l'^ 



**'\ 








^^^ -.^^ ^* "^^ °-^*" /\ -.l^-* ^^'"-^^ 

&: %v-^ .^^-- Vo^^ r-:^: %v^ ;^^-. 



^^ 'T 



i'^ .»••'- <; 



«♦' . 




•T.' .^^ 








%.** 










"^x^ **^1V>* ^^ 







\^^' 



o Ao^ 








ON THE WOOL TRACK 




[Frontispiece. 



THE AVOOL PKESS. 

{Seepage 203.) 



ON 
THE WOOL TRACK 



BY 



C. E. W. BEAN 



AUTHOR OF WITH THE FLAGSHIP IN THE SOUTH " ; AND LATELY 

SPECIAL COMMISSIONER OF THE " SYDNEY MORNING HERALD" IN 

THE WOOL LAND. 



Illustrated with photographs by GEORGE Bell 
of the " Sydney Mail " 



NEW YORK 

JOHN LANE COMPANY 

MCMX, 






The Author is especially indebted to Mr. Archibald 
Marshall, special correspondent of the London 
^^ Daily Mail,'' who visited Australia with the 
delegates of the Imperial Chamber of Commerce, 
for his spontaneous help and advice ; to the pro- 
prietors of the '' Sydney Morning Herald " for 
their permission to publish this book and their 
assistance in obtaining the illustrations ; to Mr. 
George Bell of the Sydney Mail " for a number 
of Photographs which no one but he could have 
procured ; and to the many hosts, fellow passen- 
gers and friends, both in the back country and in 
Sydney, who made the compilation of these chap- 
ters a work of real pleasure. 



•ill 



XTO 



THE TWO OLDEST AND BEST 
FRIENDS A MAN COULD WISH 
FOR, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTION- 
ATELY DEDICATED BY THEIR 
BROTHER 



PREFACE 

THE RED COUNTRY 

This day as I write, the Namoi River has come 
down from the hills in flood for the second time 
within six months. There are people at this 
moment crowded on to the house roofs watching 
sheep and haystacks and telegraph poles float past 
them. There are little lonely homesteads far 
down the river-flats where last night, in the dark, 
they could hear through the wooden walls the far- 
off roar of the water rising. The man, may be, 
went out into the black, and as he opened the door 
the roar of the river sounded savagely close. What 
chance have they of help if anything happens unless 
somebody goes out twenty miles to help them ? 
Somebody may go out ; or if he does not, there is 
a chance they will struggle out through the twenty 
miles somehow by themselves. That is what is 
making Australia. 

Now those men, women, and children are not out 
there for sport. They are out there to grow wool, 

and this is a part of the day's work in the wool 

vii 



viii Preface 

industry. The writer of these chapters has tried to 
show what the life on the back stations really is for 
the men and the women who live and work there. 
He was instructed by the proprietors of the Sydney 
Morning Herald (by whose kindness he is allowed 
to republish them here) to describe the wool 
industry from any point of view which he chose. 
The wool industry turns out wool and meat and 
tallow and glue and cold cream, and many other 
things. But the most important things it turns 
out are men. And so the articles dealt with men. 
They followed down the long wool track from the 
paddock to the loom, the industry which is the 
chief training of Australians, mostly through the 
country where that life is most typical. That is 
the red country. 

Floods come once in a way. They are hardly 
typical of the red country. But the drought is. 
When we Australians have sung our blue skies and 
soft airs, our sea beaches and gardens and fruits, 
our short toil and long pleasure, perhaps we shall 
some day sit down and praise our droughts. 
Australians owe more to the droughts. 

It must not be taken that all Australia is like 
the red country. City-bred Australians go very 
little into the " outside '' country. Even the immi- 
grants do not go there ; or if they do, they return 
to the " inside '' country where life is easier and 



Preface ix 

profits are as large. The "outside" country will 
always be pastoral. At present a living area there 
is about twenty thousand acres. When a big run is 
cut up for closer settlement, the settlers may be 
able to see each others' homesteads through the tele- 
scope. The immigrant and most Australians make 
for country which will some day be agricultural. 
And who will blame them ? It is the hard-bitten, 
frosted old customers, the hard cases, the failures, 
the men who are battered and scarred, who have, 
perhaps because of some weakness, fallen behind 
the running in the inner country, that find their 
way, almost for a refuge, out to the red country. 

Perhaps that is why the red country, with the 
narrow black-soil river-flats which cross it, is the 
scene of most of these chapters. It is a country 
where bad men are very bad, and good men are 
magnificent; but where all men are interesting. 
And if, when the time comes to describe the red 
country, the writer lingers a little over things that 
may not be merely wool industry, perhaps it may 
be forgiven him. The red country does not contain 
half the wool-growing in Australia, or anything 
like it. It does not even deserve its place here as 
being typical of all pastoral Australia. But it is 
typical of the great tracts, in the Northern 
territory and elsewhere, to which the pastoral 
industry of Australia will in the end retreat. 



X 



Preface 



If you draw a rough circle well inside the map of 
Australia about four hundred miles inland from the 
coast-line, the country inside that line is quite 
different from the country outside of it, in the 
Eastern half of Australia, at anyrate. The country 
outside that line has in parts a heavy tropical rain- 
fall, and heavy tropical forest, and heavy tropical 
atmosphere. In other parts it is not so very 
different from Europe. But the country inside that 
line is the problem of Australia. 

That country, though it makes up the inside of 
Australia, they call the " outside " country, because 
the centre of Australia is uninhabited, and this is 
the country which is on the farthest outskirts of 
civilisation. One was inclined to think it was 
"out-back" before one got there. White Cliffs 
seemed to be pretty well out-back from Wilcannia. 
But one found men quite surprised if one said so. 
However far you chase it, there is always an out- 
back beyond. Probably if one got past the centre 
line of the continent one would have to turn round 
and hunt it back again. 

If an Englishman saw the red country in some 
years he would probably say it was the old Sahara 
Desert. Some of the explorers did say so. And 
then other explorers went there in other years and 
said they had found a beautiful pastoral country 
with grass waist-high. And they were both right. 



Preface xi 

That country does turn into a Sahara in drought 
time, except where there happens to be scrub upon 
it. And it has so much impressed people that they 
have laid far too much stress upon the drought and 
forgotten the more extraordinary change which 
happens afterwards. 

For about half of Australia has a certain quite 
astonishing quality, which only those who have 
seen it can realise. It is a quality gradually 
developed in the plant life of the country through 
continual trial by drought and by fire. Drought 
and fire have come upon Australia so regularly for 
so many aeons of time that no plant whose seed 
could not resist them had any chance of surviving. 
Consequently, if the country becomes a desert above 
them the seeds that are below the surface of the 
desert will live for fifteen or twenty years at least, 
waiting for a favourable rain or goodness knows 
what other conditions to turn that desert into 
country as well grassed, for the time, as England 
itself. After the last flood grass grew on Boola- 
boolka Lake, east of Menindie, which had been 
dormant first under drought and then under flood 
for fifteen years; and at Bourke at this moment 
there are some who hope to see on the common after 
these spring rains, at least some sign of Mitchell 
or other grasses which have not been seen there 
since 1894 or, some say, since the flood in 1890. 



Xll 



Preface 



If the people in Mars are watching the earth 
through telescopes just now, when they are close to 
it, the place that must puzzle them will be Australia. 
Because when last they were close to the earth — 
two years ago — Australia was pink. Now it is 
green. And if they could watch it they would see 
it change almost every year. In some years the 
centre of it does actually become a desert — a red 
sandy desert, with the surface blown off it and 
piled in sandhills by any wind that comes along. 
And then down comes the rain in the proper part 
of the month, and the particular grass or herb, or 
even tree, which this extraordinary Australian 
nature has marked up on her calendar against that 
particular day or two, comes up and turns the land 
into a wheatfield. It is as though England and the 
Sahara Desert got mixed, and one was always 
flushing up for the time and effacing the other. 

Well, so far they have found that this particular 
country — the interior — ^is exceedingly well suited 
to the growing of fine wool. It may be that they 
will some day discover something else to suit it, 
and make it a country where people grow some 
kind of wheat or fruit, which is very unlikely, but 
would probably be for the better, or even a country 
where men have to work in factories, which would 
probably be for the worse. But, be it for better or 
for worse, if ever the old industries are changed, so 



Preface xiii 

will the old population be changed. The new 
types may be good — sturdy, heavy-limbed farmers, 
healthy fruit-pickers and fruit-packers; or they 
may be nervous, narrow, city-bred factory folk. 
But, good or bad, they will not be the old types. If 
ever the wool industry of Australia were to be not 
merely supplemented, but supplanted, by other in- 
dustries, the old types of the Australian, such as 
they are, would go with it. 

And there are some that would be very sorry to 
say good-bye to them. 



CONTENTS 



OHAP. 
1. THE MAKER OF A CONTINENT 






PAGE 
I 


2. THE CHARACTER HE HASN't . 






17 


3. THE BOSS 






33 


4. BEFORE THE PADDOCKS . 






50 


5. WHEN FENCES CAME 






57 


6. ON THE MOUNTAINS 






70 


7. THE RED COUNTRY 






85 


8. HOW IT HAPPENED 






92 


9. THE WOOL TOWNSHIPS . 






103 


10. THE GREAT RUNS . 






109 


11. THE GENIUS OF AUSTRALIA . 






. 122 


12. THE HOMESTEAD MAN . 






129 


13. THE HOMESTEAD MAN — Continued 






. 148 


14. MOBILISATION — AND THE COOK 






157 


15. UNDERCURRENTS . 






. 174 


16. HONESTY .... 






190 


17. WAGES . ... 






205 



XVI 



Contents 



18. TRAVKLLERS ALL FOOTMAN AND BAGMAN 

19. PORTS AND FLEETS OF THE DARLING 

20. THE BULLOCKT .... 

21. THE PORTER 

22. OUTWARD BOUND .... 

23. THE LAST CHAPTER 



PASB 
218 

228 
243 

256 

268 
282 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



THE WOOL PRESS ..... frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

THEY READ THE WEEKLY PAPERS TO THE ADVER- 


TISEMENTS ON THE BACK COVER 


• 


62 


IP AN AUSTRALIAN HAS ANYTHING TO EXPLAIN, 


THIS 




IS THE WAY HE DOES IT . 


• 


122 


AN IMMIGRANT . . . 


. 


132 


THE shearers' COOK 


• 


166 


THE SHED 




180 


A SHEARER TRAVELLING .... 


• 


220 


THE BULLOCK WAGON 


. 


250 



XVll 



ON THE WOOL TRACK 



THE MAKER OF A CONTINENT 

There was death in the paddock. For nine days 
the police had followed a man's footsteps. Now 
and again the footmarks would turn back upon 
themselves. Now they would lead round and 
round a tree. Now they would shoot off at right 
angles. At long intervals they had found depres- 
sions and scratches in the surface which showed 
where he had gone down on his hands and knees 
to lap the dregs of last month's rain still lying in 
some claypan. 

And now, at last, after nine days' hard follow- 
ing, they found towards the evening that the foot- 
marks began to drag. They could see clearly the 
long scrape of the toe before each heel-mark. 
They hurried on, following for all they were 
worth. Presently they came to his hat. There 
the dark closed in upon them. It was too black 
to follow, and they had to camp. 



2 On the Wool Track 

That night down came the rain. And in the 
morning every trace of the tracks they were 
following was sponged away as from a slate. All 
day they searched — both the trooper and the 
black tracker. Months later, a boundary rider 
came upon his coat. There were letters in it 
from some man in Scotland. And from that 
day to this those were all the traces that they 
found of him. 

Long afterwards a letter came back from the 
man in Scotland to whom the police had written. 
He was a doctor there, and the dead man's brother. 
The dead man had been working his way through 
the far West from station to station on foot. He 
had suddenly announced that he meant to walk 
to Sydney. Probably he drank. Certainly he 
went mad. 

Now, the paddock where that man was lost was 
not twenty miles out of Menindie. He never got 
out of the one paddock. It was no bigger than 
most other western paddocks — ten miles by ten 
miles. And yet either in that paddock or in 
the one which we drove through next to it, 
the boundary riders have ridden across, at one 
time or another, the skeletons of three men, with 
their swags scattered near them, just as they 
lay down when they came to the end of their 
strength. 



Not Twenty Miles Out 3 

The truth is that a great part of New South 
Wales out-back there — though it is marked off 
into little squares on the map and has well-known 
names written over it and even roads drawn 
through it, and therefore is never dreamed of by 
us city folk as being any different from other 
civilised lands — is not really as yet a country 
in which a man can be sure of keeping his 
life. 

When the first white men pushed out into that 
country from the fringe of the known country, 
each man took his life in his hands; and they 
knew it. There was some danger from blacks — 
not a very great danger. The real danger was 
from the country itself. The white men — Burke 
and Wills and others — went provided against that 
danger, with stock and water-bags and provisions, 
even with camels. And then, with it all, some- 
times those men gave out and died.^ 

^ For example, the paper this morning — January 31, 1910 — 
contains the following message. It was sent along the wires 
by one of a party who were making for the Tanami gold-field 
— which is in a particularly distant and desolate corner. 
"Failed to reach field via Treuer Kanges, got out sixty 
miles, driven back, no water. Terribly hot, all native wells 
and holes dried up. Frayne (leader) perished while trying to 
locate water. Made back to line at Barrow Creek. I had to 
leave loading and ride on, perishing. As a last resource, cut 
wires and worked north, hoping to meet linesman for repairs. 
Got water on the road. Further particulars next station." 



4 On the Wool Track 

One has seen the country where men have died ; 
and if the place had not actually done men to 
death, one would not have dreamed that there 
could be any cruelty in the heart of it. There were 
no Alpine precipices, no avalanches or volcanoes or 
black jungles full of wild beasts, no earthquakes, 
not even a flood or a bushfire. The countryside 
looked like a beautiful open park, with gentle 
slopes and soft grey tree clumps. Nothing appal- 
ling or horrible rushed upon these men. Only there 
happened — nothing. There might have been a 
pool of cool water behind any one of those tree 
clumps; only — there was not. It might have 
rained any time; only — it did not. There might 
have been a fence or a house just over the next 
rise; only — there was not. They lay down with 
the birds hopping from branch to branch above 
them and the bright sky peeping down at 
them. No one came. Nothing happened. That 
was all. 

What even Australians do not realise — often until 
it is past mattering whether they realise it or not 
— is that in the greater part of this Western country 
there has only been made one difference since the 
explorers first came out upon it. It is precisely 
the same beautiful, endless, pitiless country that it 
was when they found it — with one exception. 
Sheep have come there. 



As It Was 5 

Men have made of the West a country in any 
part of which sheep can live, as a general rule. 
That is all. Men can't live there. It is when they 
think they can that they come to grief. They have 
made themselves homesteads — little redoubts fifty 
or a hundred miles apart where they can 
defend themselves securely enough when they get 
there. But over the wide spaces in between they 
have to stage from water to water, from tank to 
tank, or well to well. And it was not for them the 
water was dammed or these wells sunk. It was 
for the sheep. Except for the sheep, and the sheep 
alone, the West would be, and is, to-day as the un- 
tamed centuries had left it — as the first white man, 
when he came over the red sandhill on the horizon 
to the edge of the pine scrub, found it. Some way 
out of Menindie we happened to drive through a 
paddock that had been unstocked for many years. 
It gave one a glimpse of what the white man did 
find. 

It was almost impossible to get out of one's head 
the idea that one was driving through a park. 
One could swear that a glimpse of the house, or 
the white pinafores of the children playing in the 
grass, or the ornamental water, or the pet Jersey 
cows must turn up round the next corner. As a 
matter of fact, there was not a house or a pinafore 
or even a cow within twenty miles. We saw that 



6 On the Wool Track 

day the tracks of one boundary rider, of two 
buggies which had been through a fortnight before, 
and of a wild dog and his mate. We passed — miles 
away — one tank. But the bottom of it was dry 
sand. We were following these buggy tracks over 
the horizon for three hundred miles, and at times 
they were the only thing to follow. One of us was 
a skilled bushman, or the chances are the other 
would not have found the buggy wheels, and 
would have lain down under the trees and the 
blue sky; and — perhaps they might have found 
him later. 

But one could not help believing it was a park, 
in spite of it all. Pretty pine trees, blue clumps of 
applewood, needlewood, belar, grey-blue mulga, 
with the exquisite black tracery of its delicate 
branches showing under the leaves, sailed by in 
groups on either side of us. Up a shallow glade 
between them the long white beards of spear-grass 
three seasons old were standing, in parts knee-deep. 
The road — the one sign of man's work — wound 
through the grass away out of sight. And along 
it, far ahead of us, startled by the trotting horses, 
bounced two kangaroos, mother and young one, 
furlong after furlong. Others we started and sent 
off into the scrub — at least a dozen or two — grey 
and brown. But these two stuck to the road as 
though it were made for them — disappearing some- 



The Mulga Blacks 7 

times where it wound behind the trees, but always 
turning up, still bumping along it where it wound 
out again beyond. No wonder men thought the 
land would carry any stock they liked to cram 
upon it. 

Emu and kangaroo swarmed through that 
paddock. How they had found it out. Heaven 
knows. But it gave one the impression that the 
white men who first came out upon new country 
must have found it teeming with life. As a matter 
of fact, one of them told us afterwards that they did 
not. Life teemed around the lakes — duck, teal, 
swans, kangaroo, emu, brolga, pelican, ibis, and all 
the rest. But on the waterless back-country — this 
man said — they came out on an almost ghastly 
stillness, long white grass, soft blue trees, no 
animals, few blacks. 

" Why, even the Mulga blacks from out-back had 
to come down to the Darling for water, so they told 
me," he said, " sneaking down by night and getting 
back again before daybreak for fear of the Darling 
blacks. There were great battles if they were 
caught, for their law was never to trespass on each 
other's grounds. 

"Well, there wasnt enough water for the 
blacks at some times. As for the animals, you 
would not see a beast or even a bird. The only 
ones we did see were those 'twelve apostles,' 



8 On the Wool Track 

and I'm sure I don't know what they did for 
water. 

"That was before we dug the tanks in the 
paddocks. As soon as the tanks began to gather 
water the game began to find it out, and they 
became thick enough after that.*' 

Those tanks were put down for the sheep. So 
that the sheep were actually responsible for making 
this country not only to some extent livable for 
men or for tame animals, but even for its own wild 
animals. 

Some of the features of the country which even 
those who live amongst them take for granted have 
been brought about, apparently, by sheep. We 
spent one night at the homestead of a man who 
was the first to take a homestead lease in the 
Central West. He was a grand man, and the only 
man of all — squatters and selectors — who survived 
the drought in that part. It was a very isolated 
little home, the furthest selection out. That night, 
at first from far in the scrub, afterwards, of all 
places, just outside my window, came the most 
dismal, alarming, long-drawn howl that it may 
be one's misfortune ever to listen to. It was 
a wild dog that had killed a sheep the day 
before, and came under cover of dark, howling 
after the station dogs. It was a lonely place and 
no mistake. 



sheep made a Forest 9 

At the back of that house, stretching away acre 
after acre to the hills, and for miles along the road 
to the south of it, was a thick pine-forest. With a 
few exceptions here and there, where they happened 
to catch a watercourse, every pine tree in that 
forest was dead — leafless and almost branchless. 
It was the feature of the country thereabouts. 
According to the man who had watched it grow, 
the sheep were the cause of that forest. The only 
thing they were not responsible for was its death. 
The drought caused that. 

" It was this way," said the old man. " When 
first I rode my horse on to this red country, he 
sank into it up to his fetlocks at every step. It 
was all beautifully -grassed open country away to 
the hills — not a pine tree on it. But the soil was 
so loose that the sheep drove their feet deep into it 
as they walked over it. 

" It was open country then. In about a year or 
two the sheep had trodden in the face of it and 
hardened it. I think they must have affected some 
seed that was hidden in it all the time, for no 
sooner was the ground hard than up came this pine 
scrub thick all over the face of it. It grew and 
grew into this forest, as you see it. And then came 
the drought and killed it all." 

And there you see the relics at this day — acre 
after acre of bare grey poles. There is nowhere 



lo On the Wool Track 

any trace of such previous destruction; which 
makes it probable, though not certain, that there 
had not for centuries before been any such drought. 
It is not certain because the sheep were not there 
in those centuries; and they may have been re- 
sponsible for some change — in the hardness of 
the ground, for example, which helped this last 
drought to destroy the trees that had survived 
the others. 

Providence only knows what the sheep are not 
responsible for, in the West, because the West is 
such a country to play with. In places they have 
trampled a drafting yard to dust for twenty years ; 
and the first spring rain after they left it has brought 
up grasses that had not been seen for a generation. 
In other places, with the rabbits to help them, 
during the drought they have eaten out the roots 
of the grass and saltbush, and so trampled and 
trodden and powdered the face of the country that 
it has blown clean away and piled itself up behind 
tree clumps and over fences and old stockyards, 
where you can see it to-day, and drive your buggy 
over it, fences and all, if you care to ; and has left 
behind great piebald patches of shiny bare clay, 
which, if the sheep go on with their work and 
trample it to powder, also may possibly bear grass 
and saltbush again — or may not. At least, that is 
perhaps the most general of the utterly conflicting 



Someone should Write a Book ii 

opinions. Someone ought to write a book about 
the West. 

Whatever the sheep may or may not have done, 
they have done this for Australia. As far as the 
West is livable for men, it is the sheep and sheep 
alone that have made it so. You cannot wander to 
nowhere nowadays. There are at least fences across 
the plain — though the next one may be over the 
horizon. And there is water now every thirty miles 
or so, if only you know where to find it. The first 
thing an owner does is to find depressions, dam 
them, run drains from them like the spokes of a 
wheel for as much as two miles to catch every 
precious drop that falls. Once caught, he does all 
he can to keep it — builds high mounds round the 
banks to stave off* the dry winds, plants trees, even 
tries covering the tanks with water weeds to pro- 
tect them from the sun. They say that there are 
days on which as much as an inch of water eva- 
porates in these parts : and as only nine to twelve 
inches fall on the plain around during an average 
year, they have to be careful of them. So they 
made their preparations, and they stocked this 
beautiful country with millions of sheep — with a 
sheep to three acres in some places. 

And then came three years in which seven inches 
of rain fell. 

Well, what could they do in a country like that ? 



12 On the Wool Track 

Men can get about in a country where there are 
tanks and fences for sheep. But when the tanks 
were dry, and the fences sandhills, and the sheep 
dead, a simple commercial traveller's buggy drive 
became as dangerous, sometimes, as a dash for 
the Pole. We met one man who had started 
to drive a dry stage of seventy miles from 
Eighteen-mile Well, out of Bourke, to Wanaaring, 
to collect arrears on sewing machines. They 
picked him up alone two mornings later two 
and a half miles out of Wanaaring waving a 
handkerchief on a stick, and whispering, " Water — 
back there ! " They took water back there for 
four miles and found his mate and the two 
horses collapsed. Some twig had scratched their 
water-bag. That was all. 

It is wonderful what a time people have lasted 
— especially children — when lost like this. One 
policeman told us, if one remembers the story 
aright, of three children who wandered from a 
Central Western homestead out into the long grass. 
For nine days they hunted them, all hands at the 
station lining out and working up and down 
paddock after paddock. Then they found them 
collapsed, but alive. The eldest, a girl, had kept 
them alive on yams or roots of some sort. The 
superintendent of police at Bourke had an almost 
stranger story. 



Nine Days Waterless 13 

"It was in the eighties," he said, "that two 
children got lost just going back after school to 
their homes on the outskirts of the town here — 
two little toddlers. The grass was long on the 
common then — I haven't seen a blade of it since 
'94. A search-party looked for them and could 
not find them. I had a tracker here then called 
Charlie — a black from a Diamantina run, and such 
a tracker that I had made the owner promise, if 
ever he dispensed with him, to let me have him. 
I took Charlie out. We made a circle twelve miles 
from the town. And we cut their track. 

" Charlie followed the track at a canter, seeing it 
ahead of him by the turn of the grass blades, where 
you or I could not possibly have suspected it." 

From Bourke you can see far over the plain one 
solitary table -topped hill. Its name is Mount 
Oxley. It is twenty-eight miles away. "We 
followed the tracks to Mount Oxley," said the 
superintendent, "and there they turned. We 
turned after them, and four days from the day 
they were lost, thirty-eight miles out, within a mile 
of the Bogan River, we found the toddlers. They 
were pretty poor. But we brought them in all 
right." 

The superintendent bent over his desk and 
hunted for a paper. Finally he got it, and 
handed it across the table. "That'll give you an 



14 On the Wool Track 

idea/' he said. "Every month or two we get 
these reports." 

It was an ordinary typewritten police officer's 
report from a place seventy miles out. It said that 
two boundary riders only last week, while muster- 
ing in a paddock on Clifton Downs station near 
YantabuUa, had come on the body of a man, very 
much shrunken, in brown singlet and trousers — 
billycan by him — knife open at his side — swag, 
with tentfly, and apparel lying around — bicycle 
close at hand — all much damaged by weather. He 
was midway between the track to Willara and 
another track. Officer thought he had probably 
tried a short-cut, and had missed the tank. 

"They're all right," said the superintendent, 
"until something happens. Then they're done." 

That is to say, that in this year 1909, in the 
back country of Sydney, a man can travel by 
taking advantage of the provision that is made 
there for sheep, without danger of losing his life 
for just so long as the man is a sane, healthy, 
whole man, or the provision can be found. If 
anything happens — if he breaks a leg, sprains an 
ankle, gets drunk, goes mad, as he often has done, 
— he has about as much chance as Shackleton 
would have had if the same thing had happened at 
the Pole. If he is a town man and takes the 
wrong road, just because it happens to have bigger 



^^ Give You an Idea " 15 

ruts, as a tailor did on the way to Louth some time 
since, and the ruts go thirty miles and peter out, 
the chances are he will be found, as the tailor was, 
just eleven days too late, with his bicycle hung in 
a tree and his clothes lying around. There are 
main roads in the centre of New South Wales of 
which a town man can barely see the traces. We 
struck one like that. 

" There's been a lot of traffic along here," said the 
driver when we cut it. You could see all the wheel 
marks for years — there appeared to be exactly 
fourteen of them. Another road was traceable by 
the ruts which stood out of the ground — not into it, 
because some wagon had hardened the sand there, 
and the years had worn away the sand around it. 
Another road through the grass was marked by the 
white line of the wild oats which had caught in the 
old ruts and grown there. 

Those are the landmarks for human beings in 
these parts. They are apt to be overlooked by one 
who is not used to them — to his peril. But then 
the provision around him is for sheep, not for men 
— sheep which may go six weeks without water. 
Where the Australian country has driven back the 
sheep, as it has from South Australian runs over 
the border, it has driven the white man too — a 
fortiori — and the land is desolate, fences down, 
homesteads ruined. 



1 6 On the Wool Track 

There, around Lake Eyre, and over some part 
of Central Australia you may see them to-day — 
deserted homesteads standing out from the desert 
with the marks of old settlement around them. 
That is what sheep mean to Australia. 



II 

THE CHARACTER HE HASNT 

"It's a cur'ous thing," said the bullock-driver, 
shifting his pipe from one corner of his straight, 
strong, comprehensive mouth to the other, " it's a 
cur'ous thing, when you think of it, that though 
we most has made our whack out of 'em, you 
never 'eard tell a good yarn about a sheep." 

The bullock-driver heaved himself slowly up, 
and strode out of the fierce firelight into the 
blackness. We could hear him kicking down a 
rotten pine stump. Presently he returned, and 
flung it on top of the blaze. That extraordinary 
country — though the whole West is extraordinary 
for that matter — was nothing but dead pine- 
forest. We were on the edge of probably a 
hundred square miles of pine trees, all as straight 
and shiny and dead as any door-nails. Beyond 
that was ragged mallee and spinifex — green tufts 
of porcupine grass, which will blaze like kero- 
sene if you drop a match on them. Being mallee 

and spinifex, the country between Mount Hope 

17 2 



1 8 On the Wool Track 

and the Willandra had been overlooked or 
understocked, and the grass was standing high 
in it at a time when Riverina and the south 
were getting one of the worst grueUings on 
record. Consequently bullock teams had flocked 
there as mysteriously as migrating birds, to be 
kept alive on other people's grass for so long as 
other people suffered them, and perhaps just a 
little wee bit longer. When the managers got 
really angry they moved on, and often did a 
little carrying just for the look of the thing. So 
carrying was dirt cheap, and it was a rosy time 
for Mount Hope. 

We were at Fourteen Mile Well, on the boundary 
of Roto run. The buUocky's team must have 
been somewhere near, enjoying themselves in the 
Roto grass, which was luscious and long. The 
buUocky was camped right under the well. His 
wagon, all sheeted in, showed vaguely like some 
huge rounded boulder in front of the fire. 
Behind, black against the sky, we could see 
the great winze of the well; and the low, long 
iron of the trough occasionally glinted in the 
firelight. Far away, like a cigarette end in the 
dark, a tiny spark showed where we, too, had 
camped for the night under a wilga tree. The 
chink .... chink .... of hobbles came to us, 
always getting farther away. Our horses, too, 



^^Just a Woman" 19 

were enjoying themselves on Koto grass. The 
buUocky shifted his pipe again. 

" You see, a 'orse is different," he said. " A 'orse 
has the feelings of a man ; and a mare — she's just 
a woman over again. I had an old mare once that 
had a foal, and she was that jealous of it she 
wouldn't allow any 'orse to come near it. You 
know how 'orses will always come up to a foal. 
Well, if they came anywhere near her foal she 
lathered out at them quick and lively. She'd let 
the station children come up and play with it, but the 
scraggy stock 'orses she couldn't bear. When 'orses 
came near that foal she'd lay back her ears and 
charge them like a bull. I've seen her rush at 'em 
and wheel round in such a terrible hurry that she 
missed her footing and tumbled fair over on her 
back. 

" Well, one day there was someone come along 
with a good sort of a 'orse — a beautiful, big, well- 
groomed riding 'orse, and they let 'im out in the 
paddock with her. I was half-frightened what 
might happen to him, for I knew he'd take notice 
of the foal. Right enough ! He went straight up 
to him, and bent his neck over him and nosed him. 
I tell you, the old mare never winked an eyelash. 
She just arched her neck — preened herself like you 
see an old parrot — fairly flowing over with pleasure 
and pride. 



20 On the Wool Track 

" Tell me she didn't know the difference between 
a handsome, well-groomed feller and a scraggy 
stock 'orse ? 

" 'Orses are just like 'umans ; and so are bullocks, 
though you mightn't think it. Look 'ere, I'll tell 
you what I've seen 'em do. I was with two men 
rounding up some pretty wildish sort of cattle on 
a ridge in the hills one day. There was a crick 
ran down the valley on the left, and about half a 
mile down the course of it was the place where 
these cattle used to cross it. I knew when we set 
'em going they'd make down along the same track 
they always took to the crossing — they must have 
gone that way every day. So I told the two hands 
with me to ride back along the ridge, and then 
make a circle across the crick and down to this 
crossing. They were to cooee when they got there, 
and I was to drive the mob down. When the 
cattle crossed they were to head them down- 
stream — the way we wanted to send them — and 
stop them from breaking back. 

" The men went off, and I stayed there to hold 
the cattle. Every single beast in that mob had his 
head stuck in the air, watching what we were 
doing with wide eyes. From the moment the men 
rode off they watched me. Thej^ watched me all 
the time — never took their eyes off me for an 
instant. 



The Craft of Cattle 21 

" I sat on my 'orse, and waited and waited for 
that cooee — them watching me. And at last, from 
far down the crick behind the wattles and the gum 
trees in the valley, came the sound of a ' cooee/ 
That instant every single pair of horns in the mob 
turned right round — all together, as quick and 
clean as if they were soldiers drilling — looking in 
the direction the sound came from. 

"Well, I began cracking my stockwhip and 
singing out, and they started off. But do you 
think they went down the track to the crossing 
place ? They'd gone down it hundreds of times. 
In ordinary times they'd have gone down it full 
bang, tearing over wattles and suckers. In ordinary 
times nothing could have stopped 'em. 

"But this time, as I cracked the whip at 'em, 
they came straight up the ridge towards me. I 
made all the noise I could, but they came straight 
ahead. When they got up to me the mob just 
split in two, and went past me quite close on either 
side. I knew it was useless, so I just let them go. 
They weren't going down the valley for me. 
They'd heard that cooee, and they knew something 
was up. 

" Oh, cattle are clever — dead crafty. You know 
the noise they ordinarily make going alpng a road. 
Well, you'd think you c'd hear them if they were 
anyways near you, wouldn't you ? Do you know. 



2 2 On the Wool Track 

IVe known 'em steal past me in camp not twenty- 
yards away, and me not hear them ? It's the truth. 
After IVe camped at night IVe known them steal 
away on their toes — yes, on the tips of their toes, 
it must have b n, just like men. 

" But what genly gave them away, though — each 
beast has got a mate. They'd lose sight of their 
mates in the dark and start lowing to one another 
to find them. But even then it was no bellowing 
like the way they bellow to one another at ordinary 
times. It was — mo-ooo . . . maw-aw . . . muu-u. 
. . . You know the way they ordinarily answer one 
another — one high, another low, only so soft like 
you'd scarcely reckonise it. 

" I've had 'em go by not twenty yards off, with 
me in my tent there not hearing them at all. But 
when I used to hear that moo-oo . . . maw-aw 
. . . muu ... u ... I'd know it w's time to get 
my 'orse quick and go after 'em. 

" That's like cattle. But you never 'card a story 
of sheep like that, did you ? I've 'card a man say 
a dozen times this past week, ' As silly as a sheep.' 
If a fellow calls you a sheep it's good enough to 
clip him under the jaw, isn't it ? But I never 'eard 
a story about a sheep yet." 

Now, that yarn is true — for the man that told it 
was true; and the moral is quite true, too, when 
you come to think of it. Everyone has a yarn to 



No Yarns about Sheep 23 

tell about his dog and his horse, and even his cow 
and his cat. But who ever tells yarns about his 
sheep — even about their vices ? The sheep hasn't 
got any. It hasn't apparently any character at all. 
The best way to describe it is to describe what it 
hasn't got. Rudyard Kipling says: — "The 'orse 
'e knows above a bit, the bullock's but a fool " — 
which was wrong, according to the buUocky — " the 
elephant's a gentleman, the battery mule's a mule ; 
but the commissariat camuel, when all is said and 
done, 'e's a infant an a ostrich an a orphan child 
in one." 

A sheep isn't even that. He's just a sheep. 
Probably that's why nobody takes any interest in 
him — any personal interest, that is. Occasionally 
a lamb loses its mother and has to be spoon-fed. 
The station children grow fond of it and pet it, 
and its tail is left long and it is called " Clara." In 
the end Clara invariably turns up on the dinner 
table to be carved, and becomes for a day the 
family joke. 

Since this chapter was first written I have 
heard one story about a sheep. A one-time stock- 
man, who had read what was written above, 
brought it to me. He said he once knew a sheep 
which had a character. It always wanted to go to 
the right. They were sending in some sheep to 
the homestead to be killed and they sent this one 



24 On the Wool Track 

amongst them. When they got to the homestead 
they rounded them up to the gate of the yards and 
put them at it; but every time this particular 
wether veered to the right and led the mob astray. 
In the end they had to send for a gun and shoot it. 

Apart from a statement in Chambers's Encyclo- 
pcedia that a ram has been known to overthrow a 
bull in a fight by charging him, that is the one 
interesting yarn one has heard about a sheep. 
Perhaps he appeals to pity. 

By far the most rich men in Australia owe every 
penny to their sheep. But no one makes a friend 
of a sheep any more than he would of a sixpence. 
They are counted over like so many sovereigns. 
That is all. They are fed because feeding pays. 
When rain fails, and the paddocks are eaten out, 
and the mothers are too weak to suckle, and the 
poor scraggy lambs stagger after them in jerks as 
if they were made of wire, and the stock routes 
are dry dust, and the crows sit along the fence — 
then it is just possible that if some of the mulga 
trees in the paddocks were cut they would save the 
sheep till the rain came. But scrub-cutting costs 
money, and the rain might not come. From one 
huge far outside station in the drought, a distracted 
manager wired to his principals : " Half flock dead 
of starvation." A wire came back at once : " Kill 
rest." And they did. The sheep as they were 



A Counter 25 

were simply trampling the face of the paddock. It 
is said by some that the only thing to be done at 
such times is to let the sheep starve. But one 
noticed that the biggest and richest owner of all, 
Sir Samuel M'Caughey, always expected his 
managers to save all that they could. 

From his lambing to the day he is executed or 
boiled down or starved, the sheep is just a counter 
in his owner's wealth. His life is simple — almost 
boresome. He simply feeds. Once a year — if he 
is not wanted for meat — he is penned up and shorn. 
In five minutes, when the shearer who has finished 
him rams him staggering and crabwise, and looking 
something between a goat and a badly peeled blood 
orange, down a slide into the counting pen beneath 
the wool shed, he is done with for the year. 

From the moment he is lambed a sheep is either 
so much wool or so much meat ; and wool or meat 
he remains until he dies, unless he strikes very evil 
days and becomes tallow. He is a pretty pastoral 
picture to the town man. But up-country they 
have their eyes either on his fleece or on the chops 
and fat and lean inside of him, and on one more 
than the other, according as he is to be wool or 
meat ; occasionally on both equally. And that is — 
in the simplest of language — the clue to a great 
deal of the science of the sheep ; in this way : — 

You may, on a very rough average, be able to 



26 On the Wool Track 

make out of the wool of each sheep about 5s. each 
year. Your business will be to keep him alive for 
twelve months and then shear him, and turn him 
out again and repeat the process. Probably you 
intend to sell him after some years for what he 
will fetch as meat. In that case he is primarily 
wool and only incidentally meat. 

On the other hand, it is possible to get a kind of 
sheep which will fatten so quickly after he is 
lambed that he may be sold a few months later for 
something like 12s. or 14s. without your having 
even been put to the trouble of shearing him. 
Sometimes it may be difficult to get him away, or 
the season may fail and he may be too thin, and 
you may shear him that year or perhaps two years, 
and fatten him and sell him afterwards. Each 
year you will get something out of his wool — it 
may be 4s. or 5s. But your chief aim is to fatten 
him and sell him to butchers or cold stores. And 
so in this case he is primarily meat and incidentally 
wool. It is an exceedingly attractive way of 
making good profits, and making them quick. And 
there has grown up a whole class of busy men in 
Australia whose one aim is scientifically to select 
and breed and nurse, so that the interior of each 
fat, woolly lamb may be well filled with good lean 
palatable meat so quickly that he may be sold to 
be eaten when he is four or five months old. 



Wool or Meat 27 

But it is one thing to take a fat lamb from his 
mother in a paddock alongside the railway line 
and truck him in a day to Sydney, and quite another 
to drive him, half -weaned, from the Paroo over a 
hundred miles of drought-stricken stock-route on 
the chance that he will survive it and die in a 
railway truck. For that very plain reason, whilst 
the "inside'' stations may grow for meat if they 
care, the "outside" stations grow for wool. And 
the outside country will continue to grow wool as 
long as there is any outside country to do it. 
s/ Now, it so happens that the sheep which have 
the most mutton on them and least wool are the 
English ones, the short- wool sheep — the Shropshires 
and Southdowns — especially; and the long- wool 
sheep — Leicester, Border Leicesters, Lincolns, 
Romney Marsh sheep — to a lesser extent. And the 
sheep which have most wool on them and least 
mutton are the Spanish — the merinos — and the 
American Vermont sheep, which are very close to 
the Spanish. 

■ The Australian sheep — there are about 100,000,000 
of him — was originally bought by the King of 
England for his Royal farm from the King of Spain 
— or, some say, from the wife of the Spanish 
Ambassador in London — at the price of two creamy 
coach-horses. | At least, that is the pedigree people 
speak about. There were some rather less noble 



28 On the Wool Track 

ancestors, who came through a mere Republic: 
they were given by the King of Spain to the 
Dutch Republic, and sent by the Dutch Republic 
to the Cape of Good Hope, and during the short 
spell, when the English held Cape Colony before 
giving it back to the Dutch, they were imported 
from there to Australia by Captain John Macarthur. 
There were also a few skinny, hairy Bengalese 
sheep, which came first of all — but they are not 
referred to in polite circles. Some of the original 
Australian sheep, at any rate, were undoubtedly 
bought by the King of England for two creamy 
coach horses. An old Australian Journal, The Nevj 
South Wales Magazine of 1833 and 1834, tells why 
the coach horses were given. 

George III. was a great experimental farmer, 
and he dearly wanted some Spanish merino sheep. 
But Spain was doing so well with merino wool 
that it was a crime in Spain to export Spanish 
rams. 

However, the King got some ewes all right. A 
British fleet happened to pass a Spanish fleet, and 
by way of complimentary gifts the Spanish Admiral 
gave the British Admiral some sheep for sea stock. 
They were not eaten on board, and when the fleet 
arrived in England Sir Joseph Banks, the scientist, 
happened to see them, and as he knew what they 
were, he had them presented to the King. 



Coach-Horses for Rams 29 

But the King could not get any rams. The 
Spanish Ambassador was asked, but he dared not 
promise them. Then the lady Ambassadress was 
approached. She was closely watched ; and it was 
discovered at last — on the occasion of the King's 
going to open Parliament — that she had a weakness 
for the cream-coloured horses that drew his state 
coaches. 

The Ambassadress was at once asked if she 
would like a pair. They were just the thing she 
wanted. So two creamy coach-horses were ordered 
from Hanover and brought over to England for 
her. It cost nearly £8000 to get them to England. 
But when they did get there the lady Ambassadress 
had what no other lord or lady could boast of. 

What could she do in return ? The donors would 
accept a few Spanish sheep by way of compliment. 

It was useless for the Spanish Ambassadress to 
ask the Spanish Government for the sheep. So 
the Spanish Ambassadress applied to the Spanish 
smugglers to select a few. They " selected " a few 
from various flocks, by their own well-known 
method of selection, and drove them through Spain 
and France and shipped them at Hamburg. 

That is the story — on the authority only of The 
New South Wales Magazine, which tells it — of how 
the King of England came by his Spanish flocks. 
Later, in 1804, Captain John Macarthur bought 



30 On the Wool Track 

eight of them, apparently in pretty bad condition, 
at His Majesty's sale at Kew. 

Thirty Saxon merinos were also brought from 
Germany in 1824. The ship Cumberland, Captain 
Cairnes commander, was chartered for the job. 
She brought the sheep out, sailed home, and 
came out again. This time Captain Cairnes, who 
was a widower, brought his daughter and son for 
the round trip. They came to Sydney and were 
nearly home again, crossing the Atlantic, when 
they were taken by pirates. The pirates put a 
plank out over the sea and ordered Captain Cairnes 
to walk along it. His son and daughter were 
standing by him. He caught up his daughter by 
the waist and jumped into the sea with her. His 
son jumped over the side after them. 

So there is a little human romance even in the 
history of the merino sheep. 

Between the big-framed coarse-wooUed pure-bred 
English sheep and the little fine-wooUed pure-bred 
merino there have been made any number of crosses. 
But because Australians bred their merinos and 
little else for a century for the sake of their wool 
alone, and thought seriously of those fat English 
lambs only quite recently when someone invented 
a way of sending them frozen to Europe, they have 
come to call every pure-bred sheep, except the fine- 
wool merinos and Vermonts, as well as the real 



Cross-breds 3 1 

cross-bred between the two, " cross-breds/' That is 
how a pure Shropshire, with a written pedigree 
that would turn even baronets green with envy, 
comes to be a cross-bred. Naturally, a cross 
between a Shropshire and a merino is also a cross- 
bred ; but a cross between this last and a merino 
comes back so near to the Australian merino and 
so far from these interlopers, that he is called a 
^' come-back." 

The theory of cross-breeding is quite simple — 
much simpler than the practice. The more merino 
— the better for the wool, the worse for the meat. 
The more cross-bred — especially "Downs'' — the 
better for the meat, the worse for the wool. Con- 
sequently on the inside stations, near the big cities 
and the railways, you may see nowadays, from the 
railway carriage windows as you pass, quite a few 
fat English cross-breds. But outside — on the wide, 
sheeny, pebble-strewn plains, where one belt of 
lignum half hidden in a barely appreciable depres- 
sion makes the only visible feature, and throws the 
only visible shade, and a few of its dead twigs and 
wisps of grass you can almost count are the only 
apparent feed — the proud little sheep with big ruffles 
round his neck and little yolk in his wool, who 
lives as long as the Australian climate allows him, 
and dies when it doesn't — the Australian sheep, jpar 
excellence — is the merino. 



32 On the Wool Track 

Now the wool of such sheep as are not killed 
comes to the shearing sheds. And the wool of such 
as are killed, merino or cross-bred, comes mostly to 
Sydney on their backs, where we shall meet it 
later on. And that is all that it is necessary, for 
present purposes, to know about the sheep. 



Ill 

THE BOSS 

When Australians went to South Africa in the 

Boer War they say they found some extraordinary 

cattle there. They were not extraordinary really, 

but ordinary. They had simply been allowed to 

evolve themselves out of any ordinary thing that 

happened to be in the paddocks, or wherever South 

African stock is kept. It is the Australian stock 

which is really extraordinary. 

Macarthur, who started the wool industry in 

Australia, when he wanted to claim something very 

flattering for Australian sheep, said that they had 

been so improved that in 1802 their fleeces had 

gone up in weight from 3| lbs. to 5 lbs. To-day 

there are rams in Australia with a fleece of 40 lbs. 

The average fleece of a good flock on a central run 

to-day has gone as high as 11^ lbs. or 12 lbs. The 

culls — the sheep discarded as unfit to keep — on one 

northern station last month were expected to 

average 9 lbs. 

33 3 



34 On the Wool Track 

Now, there's nothing ordinary about that. It is 
the result of a century o£ careful scientific selection 
by a man who understood the business. That man 
may have a surname and one or two Christian 
names of his own. But they're not in use. He 
has only one name up-country. He is the Boss. 

It is by selecting his rams and culling heavily 
his ewes — discarding perhaps thirty per cent, as 
unfit to breed from — that the boss has manu- 
factured an animal which did not previously exist. 
It was not a simple job, because heredity is not 
a simple thing to play with. Animals have an 
inconvenient way, if left to themselves for a 
generation or two, of reappearing in the form 
which their ancestors discarded centuries back — 
like the South African stock. Some tame pigs 
went wild, perhaps eighty years back, on the 
Lower Macquarie. There is an animal there in 
the reed beds still. But it is a fierce, active brute, 
with enormous high shoulders and light hind- 
quarters, with a hog's mane and a hump, that 
starts suddenly from his drink in the marshes, 
and glares up at you, gnashing till the foam flakes 
away from under his long curled tusks. 

Let the most carefully-bred cattle run wild, and 
in quite a short time the old brindles re-appear 
amongst them. In next to no time there comes 
back to them the beautiful alert, head-erect stare 



Playing with Heredity 35 

of real wild stock. The tameness is easy enough 
to rub off, but the wildness is not. One stock- 
owner told us of a calf that he took from a 
wild cow in the milk and hand-fed. "But, bless 
you, he'd butt the bucket about the yard for 
want of anything better/' he said. "You could 
always tell him afterwards when he grew up, 
and was feeding amongst the others. As you 
came near, his head would always come up with 
a jerk, nostrils wide, and he'd never take his 
wild intelligent eyes off you till long after you 
had passed. 

"Same way with sheep. I remember two 
Border Leicester rams, imported from England on 
to a hill station. Soon after came a fall of snow 
in the paddocks. Not those rams, but their 
children, who had never seen snow, began to paw 
the snow away to get at the feed under it. None 
of the other cross-breds which were there did 
that." 

The squatter has to discover the wool that the 
manufacturer thinks ideal to handle, or the leg 
joint — not too big at present — which the hungry 
man thinks ideal to eat, and to manufacture them 
out of the sheep which are to hand. His raw 
material is an animal which came to Australia 
from Spain chiefly, and came to Spain probably 
thousands of years before from Phoenicia or else- 



36 On the Wool Track 

where in Asia, where it probably started as a sort 
of curly-haired goat. If the boss is careless his 
sheep may be getting back towards the curly-haired 
goat again. 

And there come in complications. Pure-bred 
sheep have always a stronger influence over the 
nature of their children than crossed sheep have. 
It would not be much use paying high prices for a 
fine Shropshire -merino ram, for example, in order 
to cross pure merino ewes with him, because there 
would be more of the pure merino than the cross- 
bred in those lambs, in spite of the price paid for 
him. Or, again, if the boss is breeding for wool, 
there may be more wool on the wrinkly Vermont 
sheep. But wrinkled sheep are said to be delicate, 
and the tendency is now to flatten out the wrinkles 
and strengthen the sheep. The boss — manager 
or owner — has to decide these things, and when 
he wants the lambing, and when to fatten and 
when to sell, and a thousand other things. And 
the boss, as a rule, does understand them. 

The curious thing is that the boss is almost the 
only person who does understand them. There 
are men on the stations who see the sheep every 
day of their lives and handle them again and again, 
but apart from the manager and the overseer, it 
is a rare thing for a station hand even to know the 
ear-marks. A man who does not know the'^ear- 



Drafting 3 7 

marks cannot even draft. And a man who cannot 
draft has not begun the elements of the science of 
sheep-breeding. 

Perhaps there are ewes and wethers in the same 
paddock which have to be separated. They are 
mustered, driven to the drafting-yard, and penned. 
From this big pen down the middle of other pens 
leads a long narrow passage — a race, wide enough 
for one sheep only. Along this, one after the other, 
in batches, the sheep are bolted. At the end is a 
gate. At the gate is a man. 

Now on the ear of each sheep there is a mark. 
If it is a ewe, it is on the right ear; if it is a 
wether, it is on the left. The man at the gate has 
to spot which it is as it bolts towards him. If it is 
a wether he slams across the race the gate, which 
bars it, and at the same time opens the way into a 
pen at the side. If it is a ewe he bangs the gate 
shut again, leaving the race clear, and shutting the 
pen at the side. Gradually, amidst the scuffle and 
the dust, and the yapping and the slam, slam of 
the gate, you realise that the pen at the side is 
filling with wethers, and the pen at the end of the 
race with ewes. 

There are five or six sheep bolting down the 
race at the same time. By the time the first is at 
the gate a sixth is being driven into the race. The 
man at the gate has to catch the ear-mark of the 



38 On the Wool Track 

sheep farthest back. He does not watch it after 
that. As No. 1 comes towards him he is watching 
No. 2, and then No. 3 and No. 4. By the time 
he spots No. 5 perhaps No. 1 has reached him. 
He has to remember what it was, and work 
the gate accordingly. So he reads at least three 
or four or five sheep ahead — as a musician 
reads music. 

Not only so: there may be lambs also, or two 
different years' sheep in the mob. If so, he can 
draft three lots by working two gates ; or four lots 
by working three gates. And occasionally, draft- 
ing three lots at any rate, he will be counting one 
lot all the time. 

Therefore drafting is an advanced art. Probably 
the boss learned it in his father s time, and his 
sons, in their turn — or his manager or overseer, 
who are bosses too — do it for him. 

The boss is authority on a sheep station, 
unquestioned authority amongst men who do not 
readily recognise any authority at all. They are 
incomparably more difficult to command than any 
class of European. They do not pull their fore- 
locks, or touch their hats, or even, it may be, 
remove their pipes. If they call him "Sir" once 
in each separate conversation it is enough for them. 
But they will do what he tells them, and often a 
good deal more, with a quiet resource which few 



The Man in Authority 39 

Europeans could compass. The boss is about the 
only class that has unquestioned personal authority 
in Australia. And it has made him distinct from 
all others. 

When first he rode on to his country thirty or 
forty years back he could sit in his saddle and tie 
the long kangaroo grass over his horse's shoulders. 
It grew in the hollows chiefly, where the kangaroos 
fed. There was Number Nine, as thick and 
tough when it dried as No. 9 fencing wire; and 
tufts of mulga grass on the red country — which 
always means the high country, though country is 
" high " out here if it is ten feet higher than the 
black river soil. Best of all, on the flats there 
was Mitchell grass — square miles of it. There 
was not a fence, or a tank, or a hoof upon it ; 
nor a rabbit. 

To-day, where the mulga grass used to grow, on 
the edge of the red country, looking out over the 
black soil, built round a courtyard, shading its eyes 
under a deep verandah, and cuddled behind a line 
of stumpy native trees, is a long, low, one-story 
house with a shiny roof, on which you may catch 
the sun from ten miles away. The kangaroo grass 
and the Mitchell grass are gone, as often as not, 
and in their place is pigweed or Spanish thistle, or 
some rubbish brought down by the '90 flood. But 
there still, in some cases — in few cases out-back, 



40 On the Wool Track 

more's the pity — inside the comfortable front room, 
in an armchair, between the pianola and the big 
wood fire, with his spectacles on his forehead and 
the newspaper at his side, is the old boss. 

For forty years, in the interval, he has risen with 
the kukuburra,^ and has gone to bed with him. 
From the moment when the kukuburra catches 
sight of the first grey band on the horizon, and 
gives his first satisfied chuckle, to the moment 
when he says his last sleepy prayer to the evening 
star, the boss has had to move amongst strong, 
independent, sometimes unruly men with an un- 
questionable authority. He has had no immemorial 
feudal tradition to prop him up, or respect for his 
birth. Often he has had no birth to respect. If 
he had depended on the arm of the law to help him 
he would have been in a pretty bad way. For the 
nearest approach to the arm is one trooper, forty 
miles away. He knew from the first if he was to 
make anything of his life at all he had to depend 
on his common sense and courage, and the sheer 
ability to lead which generally exists somewhere 
deep down in people of British birth. And if doing 

1 There is a sober-plumed grey bird of the kingfisher tribe 
all through the Australian bush. He has a long chuckle by 
way of a call, and the natives name him the " kukuburra " — 
which is strangely near to the English " cuckoo." His laugh 
is the first sound in the bush of a morning and the last sound 
at night. 



At Issue 41 

that — taking responsibility and command, not to 
speak of gain and losses, shocks and successes, un- 
shared for forty years — did not manufacture a 
distinct and separate man, it is hard to say what 
would. 

There almost always comes a time when the 
boss's authority is at issue; not a continental re- 
bellion, but some mean Anglo-Saxon " try-on," with 
results out of all proportion. It is only natural that 
the strong, crude people out-back will not lie down 
under authority unquestioning. As often as not 
it will be when the boss is young, working on 
his fathers station, or jackerooing. It may be 
that someone in the hut, some man that is doing 
the sa;me work perhaps, will call him by his 
Christian name. 

" Give us a hand to shift this. Jack." 

That is a pure "try on." It is dropped quite 
casually and unexpectedly ; but every man in the 
hut, though he mayn't appear to have heard it, is 
suddenly all eyes to see what will happen. Even 
if it occurs out on the road with no one to hear it, 
there is only one thing to be done, and done 
instantly. 

"See here, Thompson," says the young boss, 
picking up for once the man's surname, " as long 
as I'm here I'm Mr McDonald — and don't you 
forget it." 



42 On the Wool Track 

That may conceivably mean a fight. It is much 
better to avoid fighting ; but there are times when 
it is an incalculable advantage to the boss to be 
able to use his hands. In one shed which we 
visited there had been a row. A shearer wanted 
to fight the overseer. It happened that the boss 
came along ; he was not a big man, but he could 
fight like a game-cock, and people knew it. 

" 111 have no fighting in the shed," he said quietly 
to the shearer, " and you can leave Mr Jeffries 
alone. If you want to fight, and care to come out- 
side, I can accommodate you." 

But the shearer did not want. He took his 
cheque and went. 

Can anyone doubt that there are the makings of 
a grand man in this life ? There is no chance for 
anything kid-gloved. We called at one beautiful 
home in the north-west, a house full of the luxuries 
of the city, of the latest books and papers, connected 
with a telephone, lighted with gas. In sight of the 
drawing-room, far over the rich plain, was a distant 
streak of water. 

Once or twice in a year, when rain falls on 
certain hills on the horizon, they find that certain 
creeks and channels and billabongs are quietly 
filling. Of a sudden, on one corner of the run, you 
can hear a rustle — almost a low roar. It is the 
river that has begun to flow down a certain back- 



Tonic 43 

water which wanders for miles around the country 
and back to the river again. As the water rises it 
cuts off strips of high ground into islands. Twenty 
or thirty kite-hawks gathered from somewhere are 
fluttering and screeching over something that is 
being cut off and drowned. Rabbits and paddy- 
melons^ are crowded on the gradually shrinking 
islands until there are only fallen tree-trunks left 
showing, with the rabbits creeping along them 
exactly as tin ones do in a shooting gallery. 
Rabbits can swim all right until they turn. And 
bullocks can generally cross that water. But sheep 
get cut off and will not try. 

Now, at those times it is all in the day's work to 
ride to the billabong, swim your horse across the 
water, and get the sheep out. Also, in order to get 
into town there are actually three deep streams — 
one of them wide and flowing fast — to swim 
your horse across. You step almost from the 
door of that homestead into a gully down which 
is running a deep swollen river. The boys who 
live in that beautiful house think no more about 
crossing three watercourses than they do of a 
game of billiards. But the refinement of home 
with a tonic like this provided outside the door 
of it has had something to do with turning out 
the boss. 

^ About the smallest sort of kangaroo. 



44 On the Wool Track 

There is no refinement which comes as quite such 
a surprise to one in these back corners of the State 
as the telephone. We arrived one day after a fifty- 
mile drive on a route along which only one 
boundary rider lived — and he was not at home — 
at the back station of a big Darling run. The 
station fronted on the Darling River about sixty 
miles away. But the owner happened to be making 
a round trip, and he drove up a few minutes after 
we did. They were naturally not expecting any 
travelling city man out there, but it is a way they 
have in the West, when a stray visitor s buggy- 
horse puts his head over the gate, to look as if they 
had been expecting him for months; and there 
being only one spare bedroom the city man shared 
it with the owner. 

At the end of dinner the boss pushed back his 
chair and took it across to the telephone on the 
wall at his back. He sat down under the telephone, 
settled himself comfortably with the receiver, and 
then proceeded to have an after-dinner yarn with 
his sister, who was at another of his stations some- 
where down the river, across one hundred and 
thirty miles of telephone wire. It was not a mere 
dialogue. That boss owns some five stations this 
side of the Darling and the other, and somebody at 
one or two, at least, of the other stations was 
joining in that chat. There may be thirty or fifty 



A Manager 45 

miles between two stations, and the different stations 
in between act as telephone exchanges for the 
various lines that branch off them to the out 
stations. It appears that every night at the same 
hour — about dessert time if there were any dessert 
to be had — the boss sits down and winds up the 
day with that little scrap of sociability. 

Sometimes the top wire of a fence is used for a 
telephone line. But as this wire usually becomes 
useless when it is most needed — in wet weather or 
in bush fires — they do not often trust to it 
nowadays. 

The boss differs altogether from the reputed 
English aristocrat in that he's not afraid to talk 
about his trade. Why should he be? He has 
given his life to it. The up-country Australian is 
the most capable man, probably, in the Anglo-Saxon 
races. Because he has not had the proper materials 
he has learnt to make shift with any materials. 
But he has also learnt a terrible way of leaving a 
thing when it is " near enough." 

The boss started life with a motto: ''Near 
enough is not good enough for me," and for forty 
years he has made his men work up to it. It may 
nowadays be only a small " inside " station, for the 
day of big "inside" runs is gone, and the day 
seems to be coming of little stations, four thousand 
to ten thousand acres in good country, exceedingly 



46 On the Wool Track 

well managed, so that two sheep can feed where 
one before. The fences are well kept, the gates 
strong, the paddocks clean. It is incalculable how 
the station hands will learn from a station like 
that. The share farms which spring up on it 
should be models compared with those on a slackly 
managed run. 

So the boss has grown, not ashamed to do a deal 
in the light of day, to drive over the paddocks 
with an agent and a buyer, and fence and parry 
and fix up a shrewd sale after lunch ; and to talk 
shop no end. If you visit an Australian station it 
is about even chances you find the boss driving 
over some buyer to have a look at the sheep in a 
back paddock. It has not always been fair weather. 
Indeed, out West the rule has been disaster — typi- 
cally Australian disaster, because nothing happened, 
but it simply did not rain. The stock went on 
feeding, and the grass went on dying, and the 
stock routes became dustier and dustier, until one 
critical day came. You could not always tell when 
it came, often not till after it had gone, but it 
came and went all the same — the day when the 
stock route was passable for the last time, and 
the sheep had still strength to get away if the 
boss so chose. 

The boss can hardly be blamed for not choos- 
ing. It was a big expense and a big risk. Big 



Disaster 47 

ragged clouds were flying low down over the 
country, and it might rain to-morrow. So the 
chance went by. The sheep stayed. And presently 
grass ran out. The boss bought feed for his horses 
and paid men to cut scrub for his sheep. Then the 
money ran out too. 

It was no good ruining himself to keep the sheep 
alive and then letting them die when they were his 
only asset. It might rain to-morrow. So the boss 
borrowed and went on. In the end, when the stock 
had trampled out the roots of most of the grass, and 
then had mostly died, the mortgagees came in and 
took the station. Sometimes they left the boss 
as manager. But the men who owned "outside" 
runs before the drought, and who own the same 
runs still, may almost be counted on the fingers. 

The boss has not always been a good man. 
There have been men, no doubt, living on the 
fringe of settlement whose deeds will never be told 
if only because those who knew of them would 
not have the courage to tell them. One very old 
pioneer on the Darling said to us : "I sometimes 
think the drought came upon the squatters as a 
retribution for some of the wickedness that has 
been done.'' 

But there have been black sheep even among 
bishops ; and amongst bishops there have not been 
more upstanding,God-f earing, strong, frank, generous, 



48 On the Wool Track 

magnificent men than there have been and still are 
amongst the squatters of New South Wales. The 
turn of the wheel has crushed a proportion of the 
older ones. But that is a dismal tale, and there is 
no call to be dismal just now, when most of the 
West here is looking like a wheatfield. Droughts 
notwithstanding, inside and out it is an immensely 
prosperous, great country. And the old boss, 
though he took shock after shock when he had to, 
with the dignity and pluck of a French aristocrat, 
is often enough left, in the evening of his days, to 
watch the kukuburras from the homestead he 
has built. 

" My old friends," he calls them. " There are 
four of 'em/' he tells you, "that sit on a bough 
right opposite my window. One chap every day 
sees the grey in the sky even before I do. 
He lets go a chuckle half an hour before the 
rest. . . ." 

The boss knew him there before the run was 
fenced. He has heard him first in the morning 
when as a youngster he used to camp on the Namoi 
bank, waiting on the flood to cross with stock from 
Queensland. He has heard him last at night on 
the Murrumbidgee, when the camp-fire lit up the 
gaunt arms of ring-barked river gums which no 
fire could burn. Slow of speech, great of limb, 
courteous, understanding of men, a lover of animals 



The Setting of the Sun 49 

— conservative though he may be, aristocrat though 
he undoubtedly is in fact, whatever he may be in 
name — his day's work out with the kukuburra has 
made of him probably the finest type of all 
Australians, and the simplest. He asks for no 
better requiem than that of his old friend when 
it comes to the setting of the sun. 



IV 

BEFORE THE PADDOCKS 

Even the tradition of them has almost gone from 

the "inside" country. And yet most of us have 

some half -forgotten childish recollection of a tall 

gaunt figure in a long frayed overcoat, a shabby 

felt hat half hiding the sunken cheeks, and thin 

grey beard and hard lines drawn as with a ruler 

across his face. One can see the round backs of a 

hundred sheep feeding in the hollow below him. 

And still as a statue on the hill there, the ragged 

edges of his overcoat showing against the yellow 

sky, with his stick and his pipe and his dog — the 

old man himself. With no other companions, he 

lived year in and year out — twenty, thirty, forty 

miles from the homestead. Once in three weeks 

or more a cart would turn up with his rations. 

But seeing men so seldom, he came not to wish to 

see them — a " hatter " they called him for his 

madness. That man was the Shepherd. 

In the days when there was not a fence from 

50 



The "Hatter" 51 

the Darling to the Indian Ocean, and two thousand 
miles square of Australia was exactly as Providence 
and the blackfellow had left it, the men who 
crossed the borders of settled country and came 
out on to the plains could let their cattle scratch 
more or less for themselves, as they still do in 
the Gulf. But sheep had to be watched day 
and night for fear — amongst other fears — of the 
native dog. 

Few people realise that that stage, which is 
prehistoric in the East, existed only the other day 
— well within memory — along the Darling. A 
week or two back, driving in a Dunlop paddock 
about eleven miles the other side of the Darling, 
winding through what looked like an open park 
of budda and emu bush and leopardwood, where 
daisies and short herbage, and perhaps some never- 
fail, grew fairly well between the trees, we found 
ourselves suddenly out upon a patch about the 
size of a tennis court as brilliant and soft and 
close as a square of rich green carpet. 

When you come on that sort of thing in the 
West you look for the cause. This delicate country 
responds like a piano to whatever touches it. 
Nearer the river there had been a similar carpet 
on a patch of brick-red earth — which shows where 
long ago, in the first days of pioneer settlement 
across the Darling, the woolshed of the Bogan 



52 On the Wool Track 

River Company, with Heaven knows how many 
bales of wool inside it, burned and smouldered for 
months, or perhaps years. You may still pick up 
there certain chunks of light igneous purple rock 
not unlike lava. They are not rocks really ; they 
are all that is left of the Bogan Company's 
wool. 

But there is no second woolshed back here. 
That square green court marks out, as clearly as 
if it were coloured on a map, the lines within 
which some forgotten shepherd penned his sheep 
night after night from the dogs and the natives 
in the days when the land across the Darling 
was almost no man's land. Not far away is 
a half-buried sheet of iron, which was once his 
tank. 

We met on the Darling one who had been a 
shepherd in his youth. He had to be a shepherd 
because he was sent to work with relations, and 
was put at the lowest work and the lowest wage. 
And he told us how, after he had penned his sheep 
of an evening and turned into the little tent that 
fluttered pink in the night behind the fire-glow 
in a very lonely paddock near the Lachlan (the 
ration cart came to him only once in five or six 
weeks), as he was dozing into sleep about nine or 
ten o'clock, there would come from out of the night 
a long, dreary howl. 



At Still of Night 53 

" Curious thing is, they'd always sit down out- 
side the pen and howl whilst they were thinking 
of it/' he said. 

All is quiet as death again for an hour and 
a half. Then, without any warning, comes a 
scamper — rushes of sheep in the pen. That 
means he is over the fence and amongst them 
at last. The shepherd jumps up and shouts, 
and the scatter stops. The dog is out of it 
like the wind — will not come back for an hour 
or two. 

" It was generally enough to sing out," he says. 
"Sometimes you might have to pick up a fire- 
stick." 

One night on the run a shepherd had to leave 
his pen. Probably the cart had not come round, 
and he was short of food. That night a dog 
killed forty sheep. A dog has no cold store. 
He did not kill forty sheep for a meal, but 
for pure devilment. At most he would tear off 
the wool and take a kidney or liver, to which 
by some unaccountable instinct the dogs knew 
the way, almost before they knew a sheep by 
sight. Little wonder there was work for the 
shepherd. 

They were men almost wild — often " old hands." 
"They feared neither God nor man," one pioneer 
told us. " One of my shepherds stole a horse and 



54 On the Wool Track 

started off to join Thunderbolt, the bushranger. I 
caught him on the way and sent him to be tried. 
In due course a policeman was sent down the 
Darling to serve subpoenas on the witnesses. He 
was the first policeman ever sent down the 
Darling; and he was in uniform. He came to 
my place — Gundabooka. 

" It happened I had to go over the river to see 
Mr Bloxham at Toorale homestead, a day or two 
later. He said of all his men he had only one or 
two left. The rest had disappeared. They had 
heard of a policeman coming. A bush signal had 
preceded him somehow. The blacks at Gunda- 
booka had cleared in a body. I suppose some got 
to Toorale and told the blacks there." 

That was the efiect of a policeman on the Darling 
River in 1864. 

And then came the fencers and tank-sinkers. 
For perhaps twenty years the West seethed with 
them. A whole ocean of capital poured in on 
their heels and spread over the land as the Paroo 
spreads in flood-time. Busy towns were made — 
little else really than centres for fencing and 
tank-sinking — which did not know what made 
them, and thought they would live in that whirl 
for ever. And then the fencers and tank-sinkers 
went. The towns entered their second childhood. 
The country was quiet again. But it was not 



The Great Change 55 

the same endless unfettered West on to which 
those men had gone out. They had left it in 
chains. 

There are dogs, though it is not generally known, 
on the hills thick enough to-day not one hundred 
miles from Sydney. There are dogs by the 
hundred across the border in South Australia. In 
almost all far Western runs there is a dingo or two 
in the back paddocks. But a man is generally 
kept dogging, and the boundary rider gets a few 
pounds out of occasional scalps. There was a tim^ 
when a scalp meant the two ears of a dog and the 
forehead between. They paid £1 for each scalp. 
In those days a Chinaman came to a certain run 
out-back. He asked to be taken on as dogger. 
They engaged him, and he disappeared for the 
time being, out into one of the far paddocks. 
Presently he brought in a scalp ; and then another 
and another, and then scalps every week. No- 
body knew there were many dogs about ; nobody 
else saw them. But the Chinaman was bringing 
in whole mobs of scalps. In the end someone 
examined the scalps. They found that when he 
killed one dog he manufactured about twenty scalps 
out of him — ears and all. They were fine art. 
But after that they altered the rule. A scalp since 
that date has meant a strip of skin cut from the 
tip of the nose right down the back to the tail. 



56 On the Wool Track 

You cannot manufacture two backbones out of 
one dog. 

It is these doggers that deal with the wild dogs 
nowadays. The sheep have a fence to keep them 
in place of a man. The work of the shepherd is 
gone ; and with it — as will happen to any of the 
others when their work ceases — is utterly vanished 
and gone the shepherd. 



WHEN FENCES CAME 

The sheep has a fence to look after him nowadays. 
Strictly speaking, the place of the shepherd is taken 
by a post and rail. But in so far as his mantle 
has fallen on any human being it has fallen on the 
man who looks after the fence — and he is the 
boundary rider. 

On inside runs the boundary rider is nothing at 
all like the shepherd. He lives in civilisation and 
may see the homestead every day or two. Even if 
he does not, he has a cottage, and often a wife and 
family and a cow and pumpkins, and other luxuries. 
On a station near Wellington, for example, four out 
of five boundary riders are married men. Their 
paddocks run from twelve acres to two thousand or 
three thousand. They look after five or six 
paddocks each. 

Now a boundary rider in paddocks like that 

may see almost all his sheep every other day. 

He can even attend to any particular sheep which 

67 



58 On the Wool Track 

seems dejected or apart. That is what a boundary 
rider can do on stations only three or four hundred 
miles from Sydney. 

" Outside " there are paddocks, too. Pretty well 
all Australia is paddocks now. But the average 
Western paddock contains one hundred square 
miles. You could put half London into it, suburbs 
included. If one fence is on the horizon behind, 
the other is over the horizon ahead. You could 
walk till you died in that paddock without seeing 
a fence. Lost men have before now found the 
fence and died alongside of it before it led them 
anywhere. 

It is no good pretending to attend to dejected 
sheep in a paddock like that. There may be a hut 
in each paddock with a boundary rider — sometimes 
two, living together. Every day except Sunday 
the boundary rider is expected to be out in his 
paddock. It is forty miles round the fence. He 
may ride the western fence to-day and home through 
the middle of the paddock ; and the eastern fence 
to-morrow. About one day in two he may spot 
something like a line of posts, which is probably a 
line of sheep in mirage on the horizon. Occasion- 
ally he cuts through a wing of them. He sees 
a man, or gets a mail, perhaps, once in three 
weeks. 

The night before last we were making for a tank 



The Boundary Rider 59 

— German tank on the corner of Manfred run ; we 
were not sure we should hit the place or whether 
there would be anyone there if we did. There had 
been an old back station at the tank. But the 
tank went dry years ago. About sundown we hit 
the horse paddock and drove through it up the 
deserted drive past the deserted house and over the 
rise at the back, towards where we knew — they 
had told us thirty miles away — we should find a 
well. 

We knew where the well must be, a mile before 
we got to it. They had knocked down the fence 
in one paddock, and lines of sheep and lambs were 
stringing across the plain, kicking up ghostly white 
dust devils as they went, straight for the water. 
Then the black woodwork of the whim showed up 
against the yellow sky, and, in front of the whim, 
a hut, and out of the hut came two men. 

They came out and stood there smoking as if 
they had watched us go out at morning and come 
back every night for the last month. They were 
just going to have their tucker. They didn't ask 
who we were, but they asked us to come in and 
have some — brownie and mutton and tea with 
condensed milk in it. They apologised for the 
cooking and gave up one of the beds — would not 
hear of doing anything else, — and slept on the floor. 
The bed was a wooden frame with tin nailed across 



6o On the Wool Track 

it, packing to lie on, and a spare rug. It was one 
of the luxuries. 

Those men, who had the courtesy of kings, were 
boundary riders. They were a young man and an 
older man. They had finished their day's work. 
One noticed that the younger had carefully shaved 
and brushed himself up after it. 

It was a very lonely corner, and they were only 
out there because the sheep were being watered at 
this well. They said the foxes were coming about 
pretty thickly; as a matter of fact we had seen 
four or five that day. And that night as we stood 
in the lamp-glow outside the door of the hut, forty 
miles out on Manfred run, far over the paddock 
came a shrill, querulous cough. Then another and 
another, the last quite loud and near. Five times 
that night came those wheezy barkings, first very 
far, then a little closer. Then silence. One watched 
the red fire-glow flicker on the roof beams ; a few 
minutes later the lambs, camped around the trough 
of the well outside, began to bleat ; and the dogs 
to growl louder and fiercer. One knew he was 
out there drinking at the trough. A little later 
the bark came from the distance again, growing 
fainter. 

Nowadays, far more often than of old, boundary 
riders are sent out in pairs, as these were, or even 
three together, under an overseer. But for all that, 



Sunday at the Hut 6i 

the solitary boundary rider, who has no mate to 
civilise him, is still the rule rather than the excep- 
tion. Now that man in some ways comes very close 
to the shepherd. Drive, any Sunday, from the back 
station, thirty miles to White Dog Paddock, in the 
corner of the run. After driving half a day around 
the edge of a depression with a skin of crisp, shiny 
salt — which it has pleased geographers to paint 
blue, and call a lake, — having sighted nothing more 
like stock than a mob of disappearing emus, and 
the lonely descendant of some forgotten black cat 
poaching in a rabbit burrow, you come over the 
top of a red sandhill face to face with what you 
realise, when you have picked it out from the 
background, to be a tiny, dun-coloured log- hut. 
There is the enormous wooden whim of an old well 
at the back of it, and a low trough, which holds the 
only water in one hundred square miles, and 
precious little at that. Also there is a small horse 
paddock. In paddocks one hundred miles large 
a man must be able to catch water, and he must be 
able to catch a horse, or he will not be able to 
live. Outside the hut, a shiny black kelpie slut 
wagging her tail at his knee, a pipe in his mouth, 
his head bent over some work you cannot see, is 
a man. 

Away in the cities, amongst the great churches 
and skyscrapers, men have ceased work for Sunday. 



62 On the Wool Track 

And right through the bush, even with these lonely- 
men, each in the middle of his own little Sahara, 
where they have to reckon out which day Sunday 
is, everyone is spelling too. 

In Sydney they have put on top hats, and are 
coming from church to an over-large dinner. This 
man has shaved in two and a half angular inches 
of broken looking-glass, propped on a pot of golden 
syrup; and has since been putting handles on to 
jam tins. 

It is three weeks since that man had the chance 
of talking to anything except his dog. Yet he 
barely lifts his head and nods. 

"Good day!" 

In the dark of the hut, over drowsy grey embers, 
in the ship's tank of a fireplace, dangles a billie. 

'' You'll have some tea," he says. 

He is delicately thoughtful in attending to you. 
But beyond a desultory remark about the weather, 
or the sheep, there is no conversation at all. He 
seems to be living in a dream, far out there with 
the mirage. 

Yet he is probably a well-read man. The hut is 
piled and papered with old newspapers. Every 
book that comes along he devours from cover to 
cover. 

At one or two of the huts we passed they had 
not had a mail or a newspaper or a glimpse of the 




[Facing p. 62. 
THEY KEAD THE WEEKLY PAPEKS TO THE ADVERTISEMENTS 
ON THE BACK CO VEIL 



Literature 63 

outside world for three weeks. The consequence 
was they seized on any papers we brought as if 
they were hungry. They assumed we should want 
the precious budget back again. " Can I have the 
loan of this for a bit ? " a man would ask. Then 
he would go off with it and curl up like a dog with 
a bone. I believe they read the weekly papers to 
the advertisements on the back cover. 

In every hut there were three weekly papers — the 
Sydney Mail, the Australasian, and the Worker ; 
the Adelaide Observer as well in those near the 
river ; generally a Bulletin, and in one The Ladies' 
Home Journal. Sometimes a Byron or Shake- 
speare or Gordon is there. But we found mostly 
Nat Gould's racing novels, in paper cover. On the 
back of one was the publisher's list of twenty-eight 
Nat Gould stories ; twenty-five were ticked off in 
pencil — they had been read. 

It is almost like prying into the privacy of a 
man's mind to look into the dark simple interior of 
these huts as you come on one of them perched in 
some far corner of some great empty run as big as 
an English county. Some solitary man lives there 
for months together, witliout leaving his paddocks, 
and the hut is simply the shell of him. Solid log 
walls, the fire-place an old ship's tank, two beds of 
flat tin, a sack of flour, several bottles of sauce, and 
a tin of " cocky 's joy." 



64 On the Wool Track 

Cocky 's ^ joy is golden syrup in 2-lb. tins, costing 
sevenpence — four times as cheap as jam and six 
times as portable. Every boundary rider's camp 
is littered with half-eaten tins of it. They are 
witty at the expense of it, and yet they cherish it 
too. Here is a bushman's description of the climax 
of misery : " When I got back to my camp," he said, 
" it had been raining. My tent had blowed down, 
and my fire was put out. There was a wet 
kangaroo dog in my blanket, a crow had run off 
with my soap, and my cocky's joy was full of ants." 

The people out-back read everything — read far 
more than the men in the towns. " A man must 
read out there — or drink," one told us. Occasion- 
ally he will scribble down some hazy thought. 
Scrawled in pencil on the corrugated iron door of 
one hut we found: "Nero fiddled whilst Rome 
burned." One could not help wondering what 
happened out there, what Nature or the manager 
had done or left undone, to make that thought 
worth putting down. 

1 A " cocky " is a small farmer. He usually selects himself 
a three-hundred- or five-hundred- acre holding, clears it, fences 
it, pays for it, ploughs it, sows wheat in it — and then goes to 
bed to wait for his crop. The next morning he gets up and 
finds the paddock white with cockatoos grubbing up his seed. 
He is there to plough and sow and reap — cockatoos. And 
that, they say, is how he got the name of a cockatoo farmer 
— a cocky. 



The Use of Money 65 

Most of the scribbling in these huts is done by 
visitors, not the owner. Once a year, for a month 
or two, on horses, on bicycles, occasionally on foot, 
come by the ''travellers,'' shearers on their way 
from shed to shed. It may be the track leads them 
through the paddock by the hut. When the owner 
is there he helps them ; when he is away they help 
themselves. They are city-bred and vulgar, and 
their particular joke is to use his tin door or 
chimney for a visitors' book. " The jam was good, 
and the mutton excellent," "A home from home," 
" William Smith (Balmain) and George Kelly 
(Rozelle), cycling to Tolarno, found everything clean 
and food good." '' Strongly recommend this house 
to thirsty travellers." 

There is a story of one man who was known 
because of his personal habits as Slimy Sam. He 
lived in a hut near the track. One day he came 
back to his hut, and found writing on the door of it. 
It struck Sam that it might be an important message. 
Unfortunately, he could not read. So Sam took 
the door off its hinges, carried it five miles to a 
hotel along the road, and had the message read. It 
was: "Slimy Sam, of Mumblebone, was the 
dirtiest beggar ever known." 

But except for a few " hatters," who live a score 
of years in the same very back paddock, boundary 
riders can read. They have nothing to spend their 



66 On the Wool Track 

money on ; but, out-back, at any rate, hardly any- 
one saves it. In practically every case it goes the 
same way as nearly all the money made by station 
hands in the Far West. Even "inside," when a 
boundary rider saves his money, he sometimes 
hardly knows what to do with it. An old chap we 
heard of — ^a man born in the old country — had 
worked for about twenty years on the same run, 
and made a good pile. One day he came up 
to the owner. 

"I see they reckon the Kings goin' to be 
crowned next year, sir," he said. 

" Yes, Joe," said the unsuspecting boss. 

" IVe always been a loyal man. I guess I must 
go and see 'im." 

The boss nearly lost his breath ; only, being an 
Australian, he took out his pipe. 

" Supposing I said no," he suggested. 

" By G I think I'd leave you. IVe got to go." 

And he did. He was not married. It was as 
good a use for his money as any other, and he 
came back when he had spent it. 

The face of their paddock is an open book to 
these men. They read riddles from every scratch 
that man or animal has made on it. All the time 
you are driving through this country the driver is 
watching the ground at his side — as well as every- 
thing else within view and a good deal that is out 



Even Boundary Riders may Fail 67 

of view to most city people. "There's a couple 
of dogs been through here/' he says occasionally ; 
or, "That's where he camped— the footman who 
come this way from Mumblebone/' Yet even to 
them a day comes when this country will all 
but beat them. One of the best bushmen we met 
told us that he had been riding north of Broken 
Hill along a road to Purnamoota, which, if one 
remembers the story aright, he had been told was 
the sort of road he could not miss. He started 
in the morning, and about evening the road split 
itself up into a dozen tracks, straggling into ranges. 
It was a woodcutter's track. He had had nothing 
to drink and little to eat. Night was coming on. 

That is the time a paralysing fear takes hold of 
a man. But he had the sense to go back along the 
road till he came to another road crossing it. 
Desperately he turned off along this. Presently 
ahead of him he saw a spark. As he came up to 
it he found it was the light from a hut. A man 
was standing outside. But he scarcely noticed him. 
What he saw was a trough — and he rushed to it 
and fairly plunged his head into it side by side with 
his horse. Afterwards he found that he had just 
happened to strike a woodcutter's hut. It was 
fortune saved that bushman. 

The fashion is coming in of grouping the 
boundary riders under overseers at centres about 



68 On the Wool Track 

the run. The " hatter " may go ; but someone still 
rides the fences ; and this is the man who, as far as 
they can be said to be looked after, looks after the 
sheep during the year. And what happens to the 
sheep during the year is recorded in the wool 
almost as on a barometer. A week ago, watching 
the wool-classer in Dunlop shed, one saw him take 
a tuft from one fleece and tug the two ends of it. 
It came slowly apart. Down the middle of that 
tuft ran a line of shade. There was a thinness 
in it at that point. 

Now that tuft was actually a record of the 
history of the sheep since the last shearing. The 
line of shadow w^here the wool tore — a " break in 
the wool " — showed that at one stage of the year 
the sheep became so poor that the wool ceased to 
grow. Probably the feed had become bad. After- 
wards rain came, or the sheep were put on to 
another paddock, and the fleece grew again. For 
the paddock has an immense effect on the wool. 
The sheep that have been feeding in the back 
paddocks on the red sand of the real Australia 
come in looking utterly different from those that 
have been on the modern river soil on a Darling 
frontage. The sheep carries the evidence of each 
separate paddock into the wool-shed. The wool- 
classer could tell you. 

And not only he. A London clubman on 



The Effect on the Wool 69 

Piccadilly pavement works from his sleeve a small 
irritating lump. The next minute in his hand 
there lies, blinking up at this unfamiliar London 
sun, a wee, shiny, much-bleached stranger. The 
probability is he would grow if they planted him. 
They would not know that the slender plumes that 
raised themselves among the fat English grasses 
had wrestled for an aeon or two through the dust 
of Winbar or Kallara or Momba or some other 
famous run. Probably it would not thrill them if 
they did know it. 

But an Australian would understand. 



VI 

ON THE MOUNTAINS 

On the verandah o£ a certain north-western home- 
stead there is a big telescope. Probably it was not 
put there for the purpose of observing wild animals. 
It was a fascinating thing to do, nevertheless. You 
could with pleasure put in an afternoon watching 
the hares crawling like fleas across the drowsy 
shimmering plain, humping their hindquarters in 
the way hares have as they move from feed to 
feed. One picked up near the hares a solitary 
magpie, stalking through the grass, pecking, look- 
ing round on the world, patiently soliloquising. 
Then one lifted the glass on to a very far range 
of blue hills. 

They would have been steep hills to climb. But 
the glass saved the trouble. One could see the 
great boulders on them winking with the heat ; the 
threads of watercourses creeping between ; the soft 
woolly tufts of gumtree and hopbush. On the very 

highest hump of the bald summit was the " trig." 

70 



Not like a Fox 71 

The hills were as hazy as a washed-out water- 
colour. If there were any sound there, of course 
one could not hear it. 

There are no sheep on those hills, and no fences. 
The back paddocks of the holdings around run up 
to the foot of them, and stop there. That back 
fence is worth noticing. Over the top of the 
narrow meshed wire netting which — as someone 
has said — divides one rabbit from another, is 
another netting with a mesh through which you 
could shovel whole families of rabbits. That fence 
would not keep out the biggest buck rabbit that 
ever lived, and a fox would climb up the posts like 
a cat and jump off them again were they twice as 
high. The special enemy against which the fence 
is a fortification is not rabbit, nor fox, nor emu, nor 
kangaroo. He is the dingo. 

For somewhere about that hillside, if one could 
only have seen them, are still swarms of the nearest 
approach that Australia has to a wolf. He is 
more like a jackal in some ways ; only the jackal 
hunts in packs and the dingo very seldom does. 
He may live with a pack, but when you see him 
hunting it is by himself, a single tawny patch 
flashing low like a streak of lightning through 
the grass. There is no mistaking a dingo. A fox 
is tawny, too. But a fox is small, and lopes along 
heavily as though his tail were too big for him, 



72 On the Wool Track 

and turns round to look at you every few moments 
like a cat. We were in several districts where 
the fox is just appearing, and in each case the 
people who saw him for the first time thought he 
was a cat. 

The sheep do not seem afraid of a fox any more 
than the rabbits do of the wild cats, which appear 
to live in the same burrows with them. It is just 
possible that the cats do draw the line at poaching 
in their own burrow. But more probably they 
kill quietly, without unnecessary fuss, and when 
the others are mostly away — just as a fox does. 
We saw one fox quietly shepherding a mob of 
sheep. A few miles further on, by the side of the 
track, were two lambs, lost and bleating piteously. 
They were probably too far off for their mothers 
to hear them. But somebody else may have. The 
flock had nothing to fear from their shepherd. 
One would not care to say the same about the 
lambs. 

Foxes and rabbits were both introduced for the 
fun of chasing them. Australians have had plenty 
of chasing. As a sport, rabbit-shooting wore out, 
many years ago. And the foxes promise to become 
a fine pest. 

There have been doubts as to whether foxes 
kill sheep ; but the experience of people in the 
Australian Alps settles that. The foxes came 



The Snow Leases 73 

first from Victoria three years ago. They took 
possession of the rabbit burrows and lived on 
young rabbits. The fox could hear them crying 
as he went over the top of the burrow and dug 
down to the sound, not the scent. Since then 
burrows have been dug up, and around the fox 
cubs were lying sometimes twenty or thirty dead 
lambs. I spoke to a squatter at Mount Kosciusko 
who had seen this himself, and who when he 
found his sheep mysteriously killed had poisoned 
the last carcase, and found two dead foxes there 
next morning. 

Still, a fox has not the size or strength of a 
dog. But a dingo is a dog and no mistake; a 
handsome dog, in some ways a good dog. He still 
clings tenaciously to odd corners of the mountains, 
from which men cannot yet and perhaps never 
will be able to root him out. And he makes the 
biggest mountain masses in Australia more or 
less unlivable for sheep. 

There is one comparatively small upland which 
is regularly used for sheep pasture because the 
grass is good there in dry summers when the 
plains are dust. These are the Snow Leases 
around Mount Kosciusko. The Australian snow- 
field is not plastered fathoms thick over mountain 
tops, like the snows of the Pyrenees. Providence 
did not lay it on with a putty -knife. Banjo 



74 On the Wool Track 

Patterson s blackfellow explained exactly what 
Providence did — " Shake him big flour-bag, tumbled 
over snow/' 

Providence dusted the uplands of Australia as 
with castor sugar, dusted them thickly, but did not 
plaster them. When that snow melts away they 
send up their sheep from the plains about the 
Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers — the Riverina. 
They always intend to bring them down again 
before the snow falls. They do not always manage 
it. They give their mountains picturesque names 
up in the Snow Leases. One peak is called the 
Perisher. There are at this time of writing a 
hundred and thirty sheep snowed in behind the 
Perisher. They are in one of the gullies. They 
were left too late. The snow blew over the neck 
of the hills. Men have been trying to get them 
out this past week, and have given it up and 
come away. The sheep may work down to the 
Snowy River through some gap unknown. They 
have been found, on one occasion at least, still 
living huddled in a sort of snow cave apparently 
formed by the warmth of their bodies under the 
lee of a big rock. But for the most part the 
stock and horses cut off" behind the Perisher have 
perished. The bones of them are there in places 
six deep. 

Down the wild valleys in the Snow Leases there 



The Astronomers' Dogs 75 

still wander plenty of dingoes, and the sheep up 
here are still shepherded. Some time since, when 
an observatory was built on the summit of Mount 
Kosciusko and the astronomers went up there to 
stay the whole winter, being men of science and 
not bushmen they were not very confident about 
finding their way home to the summit when the 
snow should come down, covering the hut yards 
deep and the fog covering everything else. But a 
bright idea struck one of them. "When people 
are lost in the Alps," he said, " a Saint Bernard dog 
comes along with a little flagon round his neck 
and carries them home. We will take up some 
Saint Bernards too." So they took up a pair. 
The snow covered the hut feet deep, and the men 
had to climb up a sort of chimney to get out. 
When the shepherds came along to call they saw 
the two great dogs on the snow outside and they 
were not at all enthusiastic. The astronomers 
assured them that they needn't be frightened ; the 
dogs would not harm a cat, much less a man 
or a sheep. 

" But," as one of the men put it afterwards, " you 
see it wasn't exactly them we was frightened 
of. We knew they was quiet enough. But 
we didn't exactly look forward to 'aving a race 
of half-breed St Bernards prancing round the 
mountains. ..." 



76 On the Wool Track 

The St Bernards are said to have disappeared 
shortly afterwards. They were not replaced. 

For all these reasons such wool as does come 
from the mountains in Australia would barely be 
worth even this short mention were it not that, 
such as it is, it is in part responsible for two of the 
most typically Australian of all the producers in 
the wool industry. The first is the Australian 
horseman. 

The sheep is only in part responsible for him. 
It is the cattle, that can live where sheep cannot, 
that have given Australia perhaps the most 
astonishing riders the world contains. And it is to 
a great extent those same dingoes that are re- 
sponsible for the cattle. Cattle do better than 
sheep in the hills for many other reasons, but 
perhaps chiefly because they are too big for a 
dingo to tackle. Dingoes will kill a young calf or 
two. But even a calf is a big job for them. One 
Darling pioneer told us that the only time he had 
seen the dogs going in packs like wolves was in the 
very early days when first he came out on the 
country with cattle, almost before the days of 
sheep. He thought the dogs hunted in packs 
then because a calf was more than they cared to 
tackle alone. 

It may have been so, for the dingoes seem to 
have been afraid of any big thing. In all my trip 



No Authentic Story 77 

I did not come upon even a single yarn of a dog 
attacking a man, nor anyone that heard of one. 
One north-countryman said that, riding on a lonely 
Queensland track from one Western run to another, 
he had found a dingo following him. It followed 
him all day, running quite close on to the heels of 
his packhorse, turning up now on one side of them, 
now on the other. It was uncanny. But he put 
it down simply to the smell of a pair of hobbles 
which he had newly cut from raw hide and was 
carrying with him. 

In any case, the dingo was not after him. For 
even with young calves, the number that dingoes 
will kill is so small that the owners are sometimes 
content to ignore them. I actually heard of one 
cattle station, not so very far from civilisation 
either, where the owner would not shoot a dingo 
if he could help it. The dogs were fairly thick 
there a year or two back, so thick that the stock- 
men hardly took any notice of them. There were 
a few paddymelons and wallabies. But a rabbit 
had never been seen there until the beginning of 
this century, when a few of the usual isolated 
ominous reports of them began to come in. 

"Me keep down the dogs?'' said the owner. 
" Not much. The more the better." He was not 
going to keep down dogs in order to have to keep 
down rabbits and paddymelons instead. 



78 On the Wool Track 

All of which digression merely goes to show one 
of the many reasons why it is cattle more than 
sheep that are found in the Australian highlands. 
But the point of it here is that this work on the 
mountains, amongst cattle and sheep, too, has 
evolved in Australia a certain race of horsemen, 
than which the world has certainly never seen 
better — and perhaps never the equal. 

It is one thing to gallop across the flat country, 
even if it is rotten with rabbit holes, and quite 
another thing to hurl yourself as fast as your horse 
can race down a steep gully side, covered with 
stones so loose that your mates, waiting a mile and 
a half away on another hillside, can actually hear 
the roar and the rattle of you. 

Even people in the Australian cities have no 
idea of the feats that go for nothing in the day's 
work in the mountains. It is the literal truth that 
Australian city folk look on as travellers' tales 
incidents that in the bush are often not thought 
worthy of mention. A man may be flinging him- 
self and his horse down a valley, when he finds 
before him, instead of mountain grass, twenty feet 
of smooth granite rock. Before he knows where 
he is, as in a flash of lightning, he realises that his 
horse is sliding over the surface of it like a school- 
boy across a frozen pond, only to fall into stride 
without any apparent check on the other side. Or 



With the "Gold Escort" 79 

up in the north, whirling along a hilltop amongst 
paddymelon holes — which, whether the paddymelon 
really makes them or not, are uncomfortable little 
pitfalls, nearly a yard deep — he finds that the mare, 
by one of those wonderful efforts which mountain- 
bred horses will sometimes make, has put her fore- 
foot into one of them, and come out again without 
slackening. There are stockmen and stockmen; 
but the odds are, a Queensland stockman or an old 
Monaro hand will not think those incidents worth 
repeating. A Sydney man would not believe them. 

Years ago, at a European health resort, a magni- 
ficent old Englishman, by name De Courcy 
Hamilton, a soldier himself, and the uncle of a 
famous general, was speaking of the time just 
before the Crimean War when he himself was in 
command of the " gold escort " which took the gold 
from the Victorian diggings to the sea. And he 
told how in those days he had seen an Australian 
sit a horse whilst it bucked the saddle up to its 
shoulders and close up to its neck, until, with a 
final wriggle, it flung the saddle, with the girth 
unbroken, clear of its neck and forefeet, and bucked 
its rider right over its head with the saddle still 
between his knees. 

Australians to whom the story was afterwards 
told have said it was impossible for a horse to fling 
the saddle over his neck and forefeet without break- 



8o On the Wool Track 

ing the girth. On the other hand, at least six 
Australians told us that they had seen a horse do 
it. A city man is pretty bold who puts a limit to 
what Australian horses and Australian horsemen — 
the mountain ones, at any rate — can do, merely on 
the strength of its seeming impossible. An English- 
man would hardly understand that the orthodox 
and sporting way to kill a fox is to ride him down 
until you can free your right stirrup and run the 
iron to the end of the leather, and kill him with 
that as you whisk through scrub and over fallen 
trees, before he dodges into a hollow stump, if 
you can. 

" An' that's the best way to finish a dog, too. 
Mister," they will tell you. "Chase him into a 
log and put a fire into it. You can kill him as he 
comes out. You 'ave to be ready for him. But it's 
won'erful what a lot of fire they'll stand, an' 
chances are 'e'U be stupid with the smoke before 
'e comes out. Runnin' him down with a stirrup 
iron is not so 'ard as you might think. One crack 
steadies 'im. Give 'im one or two to go on with 
and you can get off and kill him walking. Not 
but what they're terrors to finish. I've seen a dog 
left lyin' for dead at night with his head bashed 
in. But he'd got up and walked off" before the 
morning." 

The work the horseman used to do in the 



Another Producer 8i 

mountains, with sheep at any rate, he is doing less 
and less. There is another producer in the wool 
industry who does it better. 

It may be a question who produces the wool of 
Australia. Most people allow that the owner has 
a hand in it, who breeds the sheep, and the 
boundary rider who looks after the fences that 
look after the sheep, and the station hands who 
help to muster the sheep for shearing, and the 
shearers who take the wool off their backs ; and 
even the cook who cooks for those who shear it, 
and the buUocky who takes it to the train. And 
there is no conceivable logical reason why they 
should draw the line there, and not include the 
porter and the engine-driver, and the carter and the 
lumper, and the dumper and the clerk in the wool 
stores. In a strict sense, perhaps, the only pro- 
ducer of the wool is the sheep on whose back it 
grows. But to give the term any value at all 
they apply it to the men whose part, if you come 
to think of it, consists almost entirely in shifting 
the wool from one place to another. And if there 
is any one agent in that long progress from the 
paddock to the loom who shifts it swifter than 
any other, and from more awkward corners, through 
longer, hotter, wearier, dustier distances, by more 
continual use of his quick body and almost quicker 
brain, it is the sheep-dog. 

6 



82 On the Wool Track 

If a code were drawn up for Australians there 
would be a subsection excepting snakes, fish, and 
sheep-dogs from the common rule about lying. If 
a man couldn't tell lies about his sheep-dog, what 
could he tell lies about ? After all, if he didn't tell 
lies about his own sheep-dog, he would not be so 
very different from other people's sheep-dogs, which 
is absurd. It is impossible to go anywhere in 
Australia without meeting some new version of the 
old drover who taught his dogs to steal sheep and 
bring the mobs a couple of weeks along the road ; 
and taught them so successfully that when he 
finally went to gaol the dogs continued to bring 
along mobs, and had to be shot ; or the story of 
the other drover who trained his dogs to go ahead 
and pick a site for his camp whilst he brought 
along the cattle, and found when he got to the 
camping place the dogs squatting around a pile of 
sticks they had fetched for the fire. 

And yet those lies go sometimes a lot nearer to 
the truth than most townsmen have any idea of. 
There have been plenty of dogs who would let 
their master go ahead and choose a camp, and get 
sticks whilst they followed with the mob half an 
hour behind — or half a day, for that matter ; or 
would even go on half a day ahead; and who, 
when the sheep are delivered and their master lies 
at the side of the road properly inebriated, will 



Quite Enough 83 

keep watch over his body until he is sober enough 
to keep watch over himself. 

But to see the dogs do their ordinary work in the 
mountains is quite enough, without any parlour 
tricks. Sheep have a way — inherited, they say, 
from the long-forgotten centuries, when there 
hunted through the old-world valleys wolves, and 
even beasts, it may be, whose very likeness has 
vanished out of the forests many thousands of 
years — of huddling near the hill-tops in wild 
country; so that when the men go to muster in 
some of those parts where the paddocks stand 
mostly on end, or the ridges take the place of 
fences, there are dozens of sheep in corners and 
crevices which their horses would need to climb 
like goats even to get a sight of. 

But where the man can't go the dog will. He is 
oif at a sign through the scrub, and you wait on 
your horse at the mouth of the valley. You see 
him for a second or two far up on the skyline 
working through the rocks like an ant — and then 
over and gone. 

Later — it may be ten minutes, or twenty, even 
half an hour — he comes back with the sheep. You 
may turn your horse and go slowly on. He'll 
bring them up to you all right ; the chances are he 
will not have left one behind. 

They are teaching the dogs to do that in the 



84 On the Wool Track 

New Zealand mountains nowadays. They have 
long done it in Monaro. The Australian who did 
not recognise his companion in the cold fogs of 
the mountains, and the teeming dust-laden short- 
tempered summer of the plains, to be a fellow- 
producer of wool, would be a very graceless 
Australian indeed. 



VII 

THE RED COUNTRY 

When Europeans, and some Australians too, write 
about the monotony of the Australian scrub — gum 
trees, and gum trees, and gum trees still beyond 
that — they write conscientiously enough about what 
they have seen, which is a strip of Australia along 
the coast. But they have no right whatever to 
speak of Australia as a whole ; because the greater 
part of Australia is the part they have not seen, 
and the chief mark of the scrub which grows in 
that part is that it is crammed with a bewildering 
variety of trees. Generally, on no two miles, often 
on no two acres, are the trees the same. The 
difficulty for a stranger is to know what sort of 
tree he is for the moment passing, because you may 
count thirty different sorts of tree in a drive 
through one paddock. Many Australians do not 
know them by name, much less by sight. But they 
are the most beautiful trees in Australia. 

The most graceful tree in Europe is the silver 

85 



86 On the Wool Track 

birch. Householders cram it into every garden, 
and artists into every picture. There's a tree out- 
back which is almost the exact counterpart of the 
silver birch. One would have thought it would 
have been transplanted in every suburban front 
lawn. But very few suburban Australians have 
ever heard of — much less have seen — the leopard- 
wood. And the rabbits are slowly ringbarking it 
out of Australia. 

Now, the point of all this is that there exists 
inside coastal Australia a second Australia — the 
larger of the two at that — of which most Aus- 
tralians know very little more than the Londoners 
do. It is the land of those astonishing grasses 
which spring up and then vanish for twenty years ; 
and then suddenly flush up again to the delight of 
the oldest inhabitant, who is the only man that can 
yarn about them. It is the land of the delicate 
scrub, which is as puzzling as the grass and mostly 
as useful ; of the mulga, the best of all for stock, 
and one of the prettiest, with his exquisite black 
tracework of branches against his " Liberty " grey 
leaves ; of the applebush or rosewood or bluebush, 
which when half -dry is fairly good for stock; of 
the emu-bush, which droops like the bunch of an 
emu's tail, and is very good to eat — as the rabbits 
have found ; of the native willow, which is good to 
make yokes of; of the gidgea, which is good for 



The Real Australia 87 

fencing, and which drops beans which are good for 
sheep, and smells so pestilential after rain that 
they say at Nyngan they can tell you when it is 
raining about Bourke, because the nearest gidgea 
is there; of the leopardwood, which is good feed 
and bad timber, and crops up again as often as it 
is cut ; of the myall, which is good sheep feed ; of 
the whitewood, which is fairly good ; and the belar, 
which is very little good; and the wild fuchsia, 
whose flowers, full of honey, the sheep at any rate 
think to be good; of the hopbush, which is good 
for yeast; and the beef wood, which is good for 
timber; and the deadfinish, which may be good 
for whip handles; and the budda, which is good 
for nothing except to keep the surface on the 
ground — to stop the wind from blowing the skin 
of Australia away, and leaving her cheek-bones all 
shiny red and bare and useless. 

For out here you have reached the core of 
Australia — the real red Australia of the ages, 
which, though the rivers have worn their channels 
through it, and spewed out their black silt in 
narrow ribbons across it, hems in this flat modern 
river-soil to the flood lands, so that if you drive 
only a few miles from the river bank you will 
always come out in the end upon red land, a 
slightly higher land rising sharply from the grey 
plain ; a land which stretches away and away and 



88 On the Wool Track 

away across the heart of Australia, with the history 
of the oldest continent on earth lying in interesting 
little patches — ironstone pebbles, and river-worn 
quartz, and stony deserts, and a thousand other 
relics — across the whole face of it. 

That is the real Australia, and it is as delicate as 
its own grasses. In parts the sand that covers it, 
and that holds the whole calendar of priceless seeds 
that have taken a few million years, at an under- 
estimate, to evolve, is not more than one foot thick ; 
so thin and light and delicate a skin that only the 
delicate Western scrub which grows from it holds 
it in its place at all. In certain parts, where men 
came out on to it and cut the scrub down reck- 
lessly, with rough -shod, ready-made European 
methods, the surface of the earth has blown clean 
away. All the exquisite wonderful plant-life of 
all the ages took just one bad season to destroy ; 
and great patches of " scalded " clay stand to-day 
exactly as bare and with as hopeless a task to face 
as on the day when the last wavelet of a receding 
ocean lapped over them and left them to evolve 
some covering to their nakedness. 

How much even some enlightened Australians 
know about this greater half of Australia may be 
judged from a single instance. Not so very many 
years ago, at a time when that wonderful native 
scrub was being used as the great reserve of feed 



Enlightened Lands Department 89 

in the West, and being used, if anything, too fast, 
and when the one useful thing which the Govern- 
ment could have done would have been to pass a 
law making it criminal to destroy it, it was found 
that the Lands Department had actually inserted a 
clause into its Western leases, that lessees must 
improve the country by clearing it of scrub. In 
short, the thing that strikes a townsman coming 
out upon it is that the real Australia is, even to 
most Australians, to all intents and purposes, an 
unknown and unstudied country. 

The people out in this country came to it of their 
own choice to make their living in their own way ; 
and though they are doing a great work for their 
country by experimenting with immeasurably the 
most dij96icult part of it, they cannot very well 
expect favours over and above other people who are 
also earning their own living. But they can de- 
mand that the ministers in the Government who 
are their ministers just as much as the ministers 
for Sydney, should be able to look at their questions 
from their point of view ; and they have had some 
horrible shocks. 

Just before the drought broke, the people of 
Bourke received a visit from their Premier. A de- 
putation waited on him there to ask for a few more 
concessions in railway freights or something. It 
was hardly necessary to put their case to him, 



go On the Wool Track 

because the whole of the world knew by the cables 
in the papers what the case along the Darling was 
just then. The grass had long since disappeared ; 
the face of the country was shifting red and grey 
sand, blowing about wherever the wind carried it. 
The fences were covered; dead sheep and fallen 
trunks had become sand-hills. The trees were 
killed, the birds had been dropping dead. Except 
where there were trees, the West was literally not 
different from the Sahara Desert. Some men's 
nerves had broken down under it, and they had to 
flee from it in fear for their sanity. The rest of 
the world had been watching them fight it as people 
watch soldiers at the front. All Australia, and even 
Europe, had given signs of its sympathy. What 
little comfort they had they drew from this. So 
there was really no need to put the case to their 
Premier. 

However, just for form's sake, they put to him 
for about three-quarters of an hour some of the 
necessities which had been filling the newspapers 
for months and which presumably had been worry- 
ing the Government into white hairs. He seemed 
to be listening. When they had pretty well 
finished he suddenly looked up. 

"What do you do with the country in these 
parts ? " he asked, waving his hand towards the 
window. " What — er — what use d'yer make of it ? " 



^^ D jever think of Dairyin' ? " 91 

They were a little surprised. They had just 
been telling him for three-quarters of an hour. 

But they said : 

"Oh, well, we put sheep on it — that is, when 
there is any grass on it. . . ." 

" D jever think of dairyin' ? " asked the Premier. 

Now if he had gone round amongst the men in 
that room and had hit each of them hard in the 
chest, he would have produced the same sort of 
effect which he managed to produce with that 
question. They went away almost sick with dis- 
illusionment. 

That Premier knew something of dairying. 
Perhaps, after all, he saw as far as most of us do 
beyond our noses. 

For that reason, before coming to the station 
hands — the homestead men who are the core of 
the wool industry — one may be excused for ex- 
plaining a little further that most interesting but 
little understood country in which the Far Western 
homesteads lie. 



VIII 

HOW IT HAPPENED 

I HAVE had the privilege of speaking to the first baby- 
that ever came to Cobar. When they let the first 
Cobar baby out to play around the house they tied 
a piece of red flannel in his hair so that they could 
see him in the long grass. The coach horses were 
hobbled and let loose to graze in the Cobar streets. 

It is some thirty years since people came to the 
country about Cobar. They found it covered with 
a real carpet of Australian grasses and tufted with 
saltbush and mulga and the rest. It is something 
like a desert now. 

One does not look for tragedy between the covers 
of the average bluebook. But here is one just 
snipped with a pair of scissors from between the 
covers of as blue a bluebook as ever left the hands 
of the Government printer. The way in which it 
happened — as nearly as possible the scientifically 
accurate explanation of the way in which it 
happened — is this : 

92 



The Tragedy 93 

Man, the raw white man, his sheep and his rabbit, 
were let loose upon a land on which a million years 
of freedom had stored a great forest of slender 
Australian shrubs and a great carpet of delicate 
Australian grass. This continent has never had 
the chance that Asia and Europe had. Over all 
their great size trees and grasses and animals and 
men, too, had a chance of meeting many more 
climates and diseases than ever existed in Australia. 
Only those which were strong enough to survive 
those diseases did survive. That is why the Euro- 
pean grasses and trees and animals and men are 
so hardy. 

The Australian species would be hardy too if they 
had had the chance. But Australia has been shut 
off from the rest of the world since ever the grasses 
and trees and animals began their fight for a living. 
And the worries of their life were so few that the 
delicate ones survived. If anything ever needed 
tender, scientific handling, it was this tender cover- 
ing of grass and trees. 

So when man, raw, inexperienced, ignorant, 
struggled out on to those rich plains and pro- 
ceeded to man-handle the scrub and the grass, in 
less than twenty years he managed to destroy 
the wealth which had been gradually stored 
there from the beginning of the world. It was 
a wealth which had painfully fought and sur- 



94 On the Wool Track 

vived the diseases of Australia itself. Drought 
did not kill it. 

"In the years 1880 and 1881, before this district 
was stocked, and when it was being improved," 
said the Stock Inspector of the Cobar sheep district, 
" the country was covered with a heavy growth of 
natural grasses — kangaroo grass, star grass, blue 
grass, mulga, and other grasses. The western half 
of the district abounded with salt and cotton bush, 
together with the grasses mentioned. The ground 
was soft, spongy, and very absorbent. One inch 
of rain, then, in spring or autumn, produced a 
luxurious growth of fresh green grass.'* 

That fresh green grass, with the salt and cotton 
bush, was the one thing that Australians may pray 
their hearts out to obtain — a plant-life which had 
survived all the Australian droughts since the world 
began. That disease it had fought and overcome. 
Millions of droughts had come down upon it ; but 
after " one inch of rain, then, in spring or autumn '' 
it sprang up " luxurious, fresh and green." Twenty 
inches of rain might fall now, but it springs no 
more. The same cold-blooded report of this tragedy 
went on : " Although twenty -five inches of rain fell 
over the district in 1891, no grass grew. . . . The 
ground was saturated with moisture, which pro- 
duces a green moss only, which perished off with 
the first dry spell." 



Rabbits, Drought, and Stock 95 

The first rabbit was reported from Tarella station, 
near White Cliffs, across the Darling, in 1884. 
Three record seasons followed, and in the Cobar 
district 6,000,000 acres were carrying near on 
1,500,000 sheep. In some runs they carried almost 
a sheep to three acres. And it seemed that the 
runs could well stand it. But by 1895 the rabbits 
and the sheep had got to their work, and the 
drought was over the land. Those terrible seven 
lean years saw the West nothing else than a desert. 
The sheep were held on the runs in the hope of rain, 
till they were too weak to travel. There was not 
a blade of grass on the earth; but the stock 
walked over the face of it until it was worked into 
a hard crust. A loose sand swept over parts of it, 
and covered up even the fences; and actually 
turned patches of grass land into sandy wilderness. 
When the rain came it beat off the hard ridges 
as it sweeps from a galvanised roof. Such scrub 
as the sheep had left, the rabbits ringbarked. 
Every station was reduced to a tithe of its stock. 
Several of the stations have never since carried 
a sheep. 

When the Western Lands Commission met to 
inquire into this, at the end of the century, the 
story it heard, and printed in that bluebook, was 
as bad and black and hopeless as it could be. The 
country had been made a desert. The doubt was 



96 On the Wool Track 

whether on that desert grass would ever grow 
again. 

Nine years have gone. Things are still changing, 
and no one can say quite where they will end. 
But one thing is certain now — has been certain this 
last three years or more — the grass is not dead. In 
the April of 1906 seven inches of rain fell, and up 
came the grass. The same inspector that gave that 
black story saw it himself, fresh and green and 
waving, as high as the tops of the fences. The 
coach road ran deep through it like a lane. They 
had been imagining that wherever sand had come 
over the land there would be permanent desert. 
As a matter of fact that sand held all the grass 
seeds. After the rain the sand was covered with 
grass thicker than green velvet. It was the part 
where no sand lay that was barren. Not a blade 
of grass sprang there. But elsewhere the grass 
grew again thickly enough over the country. A 
fire burned 180,000 acres of it. We, two years 
later, drove over the charred knobs of grass through 
which at least one coach had to gallop for its 
safety. 

There is a small grey green shrub which grows, 
thousands of square miles in a patch, over most of 
Central Australia. It smells of bad fish if you 
crush it, and it is salt to taste. But it does not 
trouble about rainfall. A shower or two at the 



The Change 97 

right time, and whole plains come up covered with 
it. Sheep fatten on it and so do horses, though they 
cannot do much heavy work on it if they have no 
grass as well. It makes a magnificent reserve of 
feed in this Central Australia. 

That shrub is called saltbush. There is Old-man 
saltbush, which grows high almost like small scrub, 
and the little grey annual saltbush, which covers 
the plains like wool ; and many other sorts, some 
useful and some useless. The saltbush used to 
grow around Cobar once. It went in the drought. 
It has never come back there again. They have 
given up hope of it. 

Another change which looks likely to be per- 
manent has come — -not over the Cobar district only, 
but over the whole West. Where they carried a 
sheep to five acres or even three acres before, they 
carry nearer one to fifteen acres now. 

This time the figures gathered between Wilcannia 
and Broken Hill shall speak for themselves. The 
story of the huge runs told in the table below 
would be spoiled by comment. 

There is a good deal of reason to fear that in one 
way permanent damage was done before the West 
was understood. Over a good part of the red 
country the soil is only red sand a foot or two thick. 
When the trees were cut down and the grrass 
trodden to powder by the sheep, patches of this 

7 



98 



On the Wool Track 







Stock 


carried 


Sheep 




Total 
Acres. 


in 1907. 


carried 


Name of Station. 






before the 
Drought 






Cattle. 


Sheep. 


(roughly). 


Kallara . 


998,514 


1196 


81,581 


120,000 


Momba 


1,923,000 

(now 
1,594,402) 


353 


74,016 


420,000 


Tongo 


181,207 


95 


15,192 


50,000 


Culpaulin . 


160,293 


202 


15,870 


50,000 


Weinteriga 


523,220 


624 


49,500 


150,000 


Tarella . 


697,304 


860 


27,512 


105,000 


Menamurtee 


408,888 


421 


35,091 


60,000 


Nuntherungie . 
Grassmere and Netallie 


358,2951 
322,327/ 


582 


39,684 


150,000 


Gnalta 


481,536 


92 


9,150 


100,000 


Murtee 


343,602 


317 


23,635 


70,000 


Billilla . 


379,600 


270 


16,456 


70,000 


Teryawinya 


917,337 


62 


46,108 


100,000 


Marra and Rosedale . 


372,926 


613 


40,101 


80,000 



country blew away and left straggling piebald 
stretches of bare red clay in the grass land — about 
half being thus laid bare and half still covered with 
grass. Some people told us they were inclined to 
believe that these scalded patches h£?d always been 
so. But those who said they were formerly covered 
with sand were certainly right. Many of the clay- 
pans must have had sand over them once, because 
around the lakes in the middle of the clay-pans are 
little heaps of hard-baked sand, capped with charred 
brick; and those are the old beds of the fires at 
which the natives used to boil their fish and flesh 



A Disturbing Consideration 99 

on the sand. Rain and wind swept the other sand 
away, but this is too hard. 

There cannot be a doubt that this explanation of 
the " native ovens " is the right one. They were 
never heaps piled over the meat, as some say, 
because there is no sign of fuel or blackening 
beneath the surface if you kick it open — only hard- 
baked sand. They only show up where the wind 
has swept the sand away around them. But there 
they lie by the hundred. 

There has never been a study made of the West 
or a book written of it. Every fresh man there 
learns simply from experience. They have all 
their own theories and most of them their own 
facts. So it was very difficult to discover whether 
any of those patches had been known to recover. 
But, as far as one could hear, they do not. 
Wherever even a furrow or a fallen trunk breaks 
the wind, there the sand gathers with the grass 
seed in it; and these little banks are as green 
after rain as so many garden beds. The Govern- 
ment now makes it illegal to cut mulga without 
leaving some shoots which will continue to grow. 
And the most capable manager we met said that 
if only he knew of some cheap feasible way of 
planting mulga he would do it wherever he went. 
If the shelter were once there the soil might 
gradually cover the clay -pan. Where the clay 



loo On the Wool Track 

ha^d been ploughed that seems to have happened. 
But they cannot plough ten -mile paddocks. 
However, until the soil is caught by mulga trees, 
or by some other means, it looks as though the 
scalded country will grow more and not less. 
The prospect of its spreading would be a very 
ugly prospect indeed. 

Nearer the sea in Australia they cut down 
trees — ringbark them, destroy them in any way 
— to improve the grass. In the mulga country 
the long dead tufts of spear grass that have sprung 
up in a good season stand there for years after. 
You cannot help fancying that the red face of 
this very aged earth has gone unshorn, and that 
this is his ugly white stubble of a beard. For 
the scrub and the grass are both colourless. 
The mulga which covers the country is a pale 
blue-grey. The grass is white; the soil bright 
red. You can hardly believe yourself looking 
on a real scene. It is a badly under-coloured 
photograph. Take a grey platinotype; colour 
the bare patches of earth brick -red, and leave 
the rest uncoloured, cold and crude and grey. 
That is the scenery along the Cobar-Wilcannia 
road. 

The greater part of this Western country is 
literally rotten with rabbit burrows. They have 
made it a danger to ride fast. But the surprising 



A Danger to Ride loi 

thing is that for the present the rabbit is not 
there. That pest was never responsible for all 
the damage to this country. It is proved quite 
beyond doubt by this — that the railway cuttings 
and horse paddocks, most of which are open to 
rabbits but not to sheep, have not suffered like 
the great sheep paddocks. But for all that he 
did not cause it all, the rabbit did cause an 
appalling damage. There is a tale that in 
summer, when the grass was dry and a great 
thirst was on him, 3,000,000 of him were 
poisoned in a week around one waterhole on 
Momba run. They counted the number picked 
up within a few feet, and calculated the total 
from that. The pads he makes going down to 
drink in the Darling River are in places two feet 
deep. Of late something has happened — nobody 
knows quite what — to decimate the rabbit. 
Comparatively few are seen this winter in parts 
where they swarmed of old. 

Somebody has yet to invent a way of using 
this delicate Australian country at its true worth. 
The nearest they have so far come to it is to 
crowd sheep on to the paddocks when there is 
grass there and hurry them away the moment it 
begins to give out. But they may have to go 
a thousand miles for their next pastures. 
And the trek down the dry eaten -out stock 



I02 On the Wool Track 

route to the nearest railway is often a sort of 
retreat from Moscow. Stations in the far north- 
west have made desperate efforts to drive their 
sheep down to Wilcannia and up to Bourke. 
One mob of 10,000 actually petered out and 
died on the way near Louth, on the river, in 
1907. The last hundred or two were sold there 
for a few pounds. 

There appears to be but one belief in the West 
as to the chance of using the country for all it is 
worth for sheep-raising. That chance, they say, 
is the chance of getting some sort of a railway. 
But it is a long way to the day when the land 
will give as it used to give in the days when — 
when the first baby in Cobar was let to run about 
the paddocks with a piece of red flannel in its hair, 
and when the coach owner turned out his horses 
to feed down its main street. 



IX 

THE WOOL TOWNSHIPS 

The real Australia has its own towns and its own 
people. It has three sorts of towns, each with 
an industry of its own. There is the town- 
ship which subsists on the mining industry. The 
great metropolis of the red country — a city 
of 40,000 people in the midst of a basin as 
red and bare as the hills of Arabia around 
Aden, just because every tree of the mulga 
forest that once covered them, and every root 
too, has been grubbed up for firewood — is Broken 
Hill. You can see the faint smoke of Broken 
Hill for fifty miles over the sand before you 
get to it. At night it sparkles, out there in 
the desert, with the lights of a big industrial 
city. 

But these chapters do not deal with the town 
which subsists on mining. There are two other 
townships — the township which subsists on the 

wool industry and the township which subsists 

103 



I04 On the Wool Track 

on another industry which will be dealt with 
later on. 

English people — to whom Australia is a wide 
space filled in with things called "ranches" — 
picture a "ranch" as a comfortable one-story 
house with creepers over the verandah, where 
young men come in for meals in riding breeches 
and their shirt sleeves, and occasionally shoot one 
another over the table for love of the squatter's 
daughter. And many Australians think of a 
station as a house in the bush or on the plains; 
as, indeed, many " inside " stations are. The " out- 
side" stations are nothing like that. 

Over the face of the real Australia there are 
scattered at very wide intervals, each in some 
corner of its enormous run, what are really small 
villages. Four or five miles before you come to 
them you can make out, somewhere mixed up in 
the mirage — probably with a streak of blue sky 
below them as well as above — not one white roof, 
but anything up to a dozen. They peep over 
dark foliage that is strange in these grey plains 
but familiar to you — tiny oases of orange trees 
and peach trees in a wee patch of civilised flowers 
and vegetables, bordered with a thin hedge, 
tenderly nursed and irrigated. Probably you do 
not realise at first that everyone in the place is 
overflowing with pride in that patch. They do 



A Factory and a Port 105 

not talk about it, but they are almost pathetically 
pleased if you do. 

The road winds suddenly past half a dozen low 
huts and cottages — with white-washed roofs, as 
some protection against three or four months 
which it is best only to imagine — and several big 
grey iron sheds, with the odd parts of a wagon 
or two lying outside of them, till it runs into the 
stables and ends abruptly. The manager is out 
with the musterers and not back yet. So you are 
taken over to a big stone building and introduced 
to the storekeeper, who happens to be selling 
across the counter a packet of cartridges to two 
small boys — "sons of one of the tradesmen," he 
tells you in an aside. Then you realise that it 
is not a country house you have come to, but a 
village. 

In that village, besides the homestead where 
the manager and his wife live, and the children 
and a couple of j acker oos, besides the overseer's 
cottage and the hut for the station hands, there 
is a carpenter's shop and wagon factory ; a smithy 
and engine-room ; a sawmill close handy — the 
sawyer and the engineer or blacksmith are often 
the same ; the saddler's workroom ; often a school ; 
sometimes a church service. 

And the big Darling stations at least are not 
merely villages. For some part of the year they 



io6 On the Wool Track 

are factories as well. They may not be so in name, 
but they are actually— both factories and river 
ports. At Dunlop, about a mile up river from the 
homestead, stand some half a dozen large build- 
ings. The four largest are unmistakably factory 
buildings, enormous grey iron sheds, which are 
kept humming for two months in the year with 
the industry of from one hundred to one hundred 
and fifty men. They shear the wool with the 
plant in one great shed; scour it with the 
machinery in a second shed ; dry it on the green 
and press and pack and dump it with the 
machinery in a third ; store it in a fourth ; and, 
when there is water in the river, keep at least one 
steamer making continual trips to Bourke and 
back as fast as ever she can get away with her 
cargo. If there were a custom-house on the river 
bank the trade return from that one little port in 
a good year could not show much less than from 
£20,000 to £30,000. 

But perhaps the most surprising building in a 
Western station is the store. It is really a shop. 
They will usually sell to anyone who can pay. 
And the stock — here are some of the things 
stocked in the store at Dunlop : — 

Locks, lamps, lamp wicks, bicycle sundries, 
string, 3 tons of sugar, 3 tons of flour, 10 cwt. of 
salt, candles, pens, pencils, ink, sealing-wax, boot 



The Emporium 107 

brushes, clocks, brooms, buggy lamps, casks of 
vinegar, whitening, sulphur, washing soda, bolts, 
mustard, soft soap, sand soap. Monkey soap, toilet 
soaps, towelling, calico, cartridges, bullets, bridles, 
reins, girths, surcingles, water- bags, spare harness, 
carpenters' tools, guns, rifles (for station use), horse 
medicines and veterinary instruments, horse rugs, 
strychnine, muriatic acid, sheep dip, gum arabic, 
nutmegs, carbonate of soda, cloves, caraway, 
tartaric acid, saltpetre, candy peel, pearl barley, 
picture hooks, resin, memo, pads, notepaper, 
Cockle's pills, castor oil, agreement forms, all 
sorts of jam, salmon, preserved milk, jelly tabloids, 
salad oil, glue, solder, axle grease, branding ink, 
lampblack, raddle, axes, scythes, spades, shovels, 
rakes, buckets, billies, pots, pans, jugs, dishes, 
dippers, tinplates, pannikins, quart pots, knives, 
forks, spoons, butcher's knives, steels, colanders, 
beds, bullock bells, horse bells, 40 team collars, 
hopples, chains, twine, rope, sheep-shears, axe and 
tool handles, mattresses, blankets, fruit salts, 
lanoline, pocket knives, matches, pipes, tobacco, 
cigars, lime-juice, balsam, Scrubb's ammonia, 
marmalade, Worcestershire sauce, Mandalay, 
bottled olives, stacks of all sorts of preserved fruits, 
onions, potatoes, oil from U.S.A., telephone gear 
of all sorts, tents, tarpaulins, paints and painters' 
requisites, hops, blue, starch, biscuits, porridge. 



io8 On the Wool Track 

vermicelli, cocoanuts, ginger, tea, tar, pepper, spare 
oars, and much more also. 

It is really a big general store, with a stock 
larger than is carried by many stores in country 
towns. Naturally, not quite everything on the 
list is for sale. 



THE GREAT RUNS 

That village and factory and universal store are 

rather bigger than most. But then, they are on a 

large run. Dunlop is one o£ four very big runs, 

owned mostly by Sir Samuel M'Caughey on the 

Darling. Dunlop is 1,000,000 acres ; Toorale, next 

door to it on the river, is also 1,000,000; Fort 

Bourke, next to Toorale, is 400,000 ; and Nocoleche, 

at the back of Dunlop, on the Paroo River, is 

800,000. They make practically one enormous 

property of three and a quarter million acres. 

They reach along one bank of the Darling for 

95 miles as the crow flies, or, as the river winds, 

about 280 miles. The Wanaaring road runs 

through them for 127 miles. They stretch back 

across two rivers, the Warrego and the Paroo. 

The Warrego, by the way, runs from Queensland 

to the Darling, and the Paroo from Queensland on 

to the plains, and has only once or twice reached 

the Darling within memory. But they say at 

109 



no On the Wool Track 

Dunlop that the Paroo is the better river of 
the two. 

There is one fence on Dunlop that runs 43 miles ; 
or, if Nocoleche at the back be counted, something 
like 90 miles. 

Now it is very easy to cavil at the use of the 
land in blocks of that size. But it is very doubt- 
ful if as much could be done wilth the land by 
using it in any other way. The real Australia 
is a delicate country, with a peculiar climate, 
and they are apt between them to hit the small 
settler the most treacherous stunning blows fair 
between the eyes. Here is what Dunlop had 
to stand : 

In 1889 and the two years after it the rainfall 
was twenty-two, twenty, and twenty-two inches 
respectively. The river came down over its banks 
thirty to fifty miles wide in parts. There were 
four floods in four years. They stopped dead in 
1893. There has never been a flood since. Instead 
there has been a series of years with an average 
rainfall of perhaps twelve inches, and at least one 
stretch of seventeen months during which less than 
an inch of rain — eighty-eight points altogether — 
fell. 

The consequence was that in 1894 after a good 
year Dunlop shore 276,300 sheep, marked 92,000 
lambs, sold 13,202 sheep. In 1895 it shore 235,000, 



"They have Them" in 

lost 90,000 — dead, through drought — and lambed 
under 2000. 

That is a specimen — one actual blow that fell on 
Dunlop in one year. From 1900 right on there 
have never been much more than 100,000 sheep 
on the station, and they have had to rent country 
or cut scrub nearly every year. But Dunlop 
weathered the blow. Precious few did. 

As a consequence, a great part of the country is 
not being improved — is going back, if anything. 

"The days of fencing and tank-sinking are 
over," said a Bourke man, " though you can see for 
yourself they're wanted badly enough still.'' 

"They won't make tanks and fences for mort- 
gagees to get them," one suggested innocently. 

"The mortgagees have them," said the Bourke 
man grimly. 

We did find one man who seemed to be making 
a success of a little homestead lease in the Far 
West. To those who are accustomed to neat little 
hundred-acre farms with nothing big about them 
except the rent, it may be explained that by little 
leases in the West they mean anything between 
ten thousand and a hundred thousand acres. The 
smallest leases — the closer settlement units which 
go by the name of homestead leases — are 10,240 
acres. The minimum is 2560, but they practically 
always get the maximum, and their wives and 



112 On the Wool Track 

daughters have others next door. The rent used to 
be at least Id. per acre, but in the drought that 
showed itself absurd ; so they reduced the minimum 
rent in 1902 (the worst year which ever afflicted 
Australia) to 2s. 6d. per square mile. The whole 
West will fall in to the Government again in 1943. 

The little lease in question was 20,000 acres, half 
of it on the Darling. The steamer which took us 
down the Darling had tied up for half an hour to 
leave some stores on the top of the mud-bank near 
East Toorale. Some of us passengers, making 
across country to a certain white roof, hit, by 
mistake for a public-house of which we had heard 
speak, the home of a selector. We had our doubts 
before we reached it, because v/e had passed on the 
way the smallest and one of the richest paddocks 
of green wheat ever seen out of England. And 
wheat paddocks are not, as a rule, part of the 
industry of western district hotels. Near the house 
was a large drafting yard, apparently built long 
ago. And in a shed leading off it, at the door of 
one or two solitary catching pens, with the shears 
in his hands and a heap of belly wool on the floor 
at his side, was a man. There was a half -filled bale 
of fleeces in the shed, and an old wool press just 
outside of it. 

He was his own shearer, picker up, and tar boy. 
He was rouseabout, presser, station hand, brander, 



Ploughed with a Poison-Cart 113 

roller, piece-picker, and classer all in one. And he 
seemed to be satisfied. 

"There's some reckon you can't make it pay," 
he said — without being asked, so you can tell what 
is the current topic out there— -"but I know you 
can. The only thing is never borrow ; go without 
rather. The man that borrows is broke." 

But, then, everyone has not the enterprise to see 
if wheat will grow even on a few square yards 
that happen to catch whatever water trickles down 
from a catchment about ten acres in extent. 

''I reckon it's about the only paddock ever 
ploughed with a poison-cart,"^ he said. He had 
two leases, 10,000 acres each, one on the river, the 
other thirty miles back. From some swamp grass 
on the latter he had cut and made 30 tons of 
bush hay. He used 10 last year, and had 20 
left. He kept about thirty cattle, some horses, and 
1200 sheep — 500 on one lease, 700 on the other. 
What sort of comfort he had come by we could 
not see. There were youngsters at the homestead 

^ A poison- cart is a cart which lays poison for rabbits. It 
has a knife underneath it which scratches a furrow in the 
surface of the ground, into which the poison falls and is covered 
up. Rabbits will grub for poison, but sheep do not. Though 
the greater part of the sheep country has poison laid all over 
it, few sheep are poisoned. But it is said some native birds 
have been almost exterminated. It is quite common for a 
squatter to spend £500 or more a year destroying rabbits. 

8 



114 On the Wool Track 

He was out and away the most successful selector 
we came upon. His name was a Scotch one. 

Now it seems a fair judgment to make that a 
man like this can work a small holding in the Far 
West so successfully that he probably ends up by 
holding a big one, which is about the only incentive 
for going there at all. But the ordinary old- 
fashioned farmer — even the sort that grows wheat 
year after year at Narromine, and tells you to-day 
there's no call for rotation, " You can't exhaust the 
chocolate soil," has no ghost of a chance in the 
West. 

The finest selector of all that we met across the 
Darling, Mr Leckie of the Avenue, a magnificently 
made, keen, kindly, intelligent giant of a pastoralist, 
is no longer a selector. He has gradually increased 
his holding to 109,627 acres. That is not a big 
station as yet. It is only one of the small blocks 
into which Momba (once 2,000,000 acres — the 
biggest single holding in New South Wales) has 
lately been cut up. But it is a splendidly improved 
little property. And any man who understands 
the West and has improved his piece of it and 
shown what can be done with it in the way in 
which this selector has done, deserves every en- 
couragement the Government can give him to come 
to and remain in the West. 

At the Avenue 93 acres are irrigated by the 



The Future 115 

floods of Bunker Creek, and their hayshed is as 
big and their chaff as good as any in Australia. But 
there are not two Bunkers in this country, and the 
irrigation along the Darling banks shows better 
what the small farmers have to do. For the 
most part they have not done it; and it is not 
altogether their fault. The people of New South 
Wales have talked a good deal of the irrigation 
which might be carried out by big farmers along 
the Darling, but they have never locked the 
Darling to see if it might. We did see that one 
acre of wheat on the land of one progressive 
selector. The rest seem to have done very little to 
improve the land, principally for the obvious reason 
that they have not the money. They tell of one 
selector between Louth and Cobar in the '80's, 
who did not even put up a fence. His hut was 
mud, and scarcely habitable. But he had dammed 
a bit of a depression, and his profession was the 
selling of water to travellers at Is. a bucket. 

The small men have not so far done a great deal 
towards showing what can be done with the 
Western district by using it energetically. The 
figures which we collected in Wilcannia prove it. 
These figures and this question may seem a dull 
matter to the casual reader who is not in the West 
and never likely to go there ; but it is a question 
of pretty consummate importance really. It is a 



ii6 On the Wool Track 



question of whether a territory about the size of 
India can or cannot be of use to a British people — 
will or will not be filled with the British race. 
The following are the details of all cultivation by 
white men in the Wilcannia district : — 



Name of 
Holding, 


Total 
Acres. 


Acres 
Culti- 
vated. 


How 
Irrigated. 


Stock. 


Cattle. 


Sheep. 


Murtee . 
Marra 
Avenue . 
Coromandel 
Pine Ridge, 

Surryville 
Nelia Garri 
Allandale 
Nuntherungie . 
Netallie . 
Riverside . 
Black Gate 
Mulga Yale 
Nine Mile 
Kalyanka . 


343,602 

252,926 

109,627 

8,960 

26,000 

15,822 

24,016 

368,295 

322,327 

3,518 

19,974 

20,474 

42,640 

74,420 


167 
10 
93 
67 

40 

18 

40 

22 

29 

2 

26 

6 

52 

A few 


Steam pump 
Gravitation 

Engine 
Tank 

Engine 


317 

590 

1336 

24 

80 

31 

120 

222 

360 

31 

11 

113 

68 


23,635 

24,850 

3,920 

1,650 

100 
1,675 

39|*684 

3',050 
1,815 
1,111 
3,060 



\ 



So in that district there are some 572 acres out 
of about 10,000,000 which it has been worth while 
to plough. Of these apparently two (at Riverside) 
are planted for fruit, and all the rest for chaff, hay, 
and lucerne. At Murtee 167 acres of rich red 
sandy earth were levelled at some expense and 
water pumped on to them. The hay and lucerne 
are partly sold and partly used. Whether in future 



Might be an Advantage 117 

they will be sold as a rule or used on the run is 
not yet decided. Both crops grow exceedingly 
well. 

Locking the Darling River would give the 
country plenty of high water, and easily raised. 
Could they do anything with it ? The average 
citizen guesses that they could grow wheat. For 
some reason the Anglo-Saxon mind always runs on 
wheat. In this case the average citizen is clearly 
wrong. Lock the Darling till it brims, and settle 
any number along it, yet it will not grow much 
wheat. Not that it is not physically possible. The 
soil is splendid. The black soil on the banks will 
not hold water, and every big flood would sweep it 
clean of every crop stacked or standing. But the 
red ground is high, and holds water ; and that red 
sand has had none of the goodness dissolved out of 
it by constant rain. 

It must always be remembered that if in this 
Central Australia the droughts are a great dis- 
advantage for some purposes, they equally give the 
country certain conditions which hardly any other 
piece of the earth's surface where white men can 
live possesses. That dryness has been proved an 
advantage in California and Colorado, and it is 
obvious to anyone who sees how everything — 
almost every possible plant — grows when irrigated 
in the red country along the Darling. 



ii8 On the Wool Track 

y The wheat would grow where the red soil comes 
near the river — which a fair stretch of it does, 
here and there. But when the wheat was grown, 
what would they do with it ? A few acres of it 
would supply the back country, and the rest 
would have to go down the river and away to 
England. It would cost 30s. to send a ton 
of wheat down the river. A ton means about 
nine bags, and a bag holds about four bushels. 
That is to say, 36 bushels would cost 30s. to carry 
— lOd. a bushel — before ever they were landed on 
the rail for Adelaide. With wheat at 4s. 3d., or 
even 3s. 6d. a bushel, it might be grown as far as 
Wilcannia, but even then at a portentous risk. 

But there are other things more precious which 
might well be grown along the river and sent down 
it at a profit. There is a certain Chinaman's 
garden at Wilcannia, on the red soil — five acres, 
irrigated by a Crossley oil engine. In it there 
grows every conceivable fruit except, perhaps, the 
custard apple. Bananas, strawberries, raspberries, 
apples, oranges, peaches, plums, quinces, pears, 
lemons, cherries, grapes, not to speak of cauliflowers, 
cabbages, tomatoes, celery, and every vegetable in 
the cookery book. A Chinaman could irrigate a 
galvanised iron roof and make it pay, no doubt; 
and the cherries and bananas do not flourish. But 
surely a country that will foster the Moreton Bay 



240 sheep on 5 Acres 119 

fig and the pepper tree along with the dry scrub of 
the West, and such a medley of fruit and vegetables 
as this, has got its own work in the world. Some 
day it will do that work. 

Indeed, some people confess that with a good 
pumping plant fruit might be grown even at this 
day if only it could be got to market. So far the 
irrigation attempted by the white man has been 
almost entirely for the feed of his own stock. Even 
this fodder is a splendid insurance. It will not 
keep all a big man's stock, though it will keep the 
cream of them ; but it would save a small man in 
the droughts. Yet hardly any of the small men 
appear to take the trouble to improve their land in 
this way. 

On the part of the Darling down which we sailed 
from Bourke to Dunlop, almost all the small holders 
had actually sold out ; and it is doubtful if any 
similar area of the West has been improved 
as those four big holdings have with which this 
chapter opened. About £100,000 has been put into 
Dunlop, and about £600,000 worth of wool has been 
produced there. Eighteen bores have been sunk 
two are running; the rest have diminished their 
flow, but are now constant. 

At Dunlop, on five acres of irrigated lucerne, 
which was levelled at a cost of £15 an acre, they 
fed 240 stud sheep for three months — turning them 



I20 On the Wool Track 

first on to one half and then on to the other. They 
get seven crops yearly off that paddock, and have 
just doubled the size of it. Every sort of fruit, 
from strawberries to bananas, grows about the 
house. There is another paddock irrigated by the 
water from the woolscour, and to be planted this 
year with Ehodes grass from Africa. All this is 
on the black soil — not the red, because Dunlop 
homestead is within the reach of very high floods. 
But, to crown all, twelve miles and thirty miles 
across the Darling respectively, far out on the red 
soil, irrigated only by the rain around them, are 
two paddocks of 200 acres each. At the moment 
of writing they are waist-high with wheat ! From 
that 400 acres they will crop 150 to 200 tons of 
hay, which in these parts is worth anything up to 
£1600. It will have cost perhaps £400 to plough, 
sow, and reap. There is no part across the Darling 
that can show quite such improvements. 

But the best improvement of all is that the land 
is almost as it was. The fences and gates are 
beautifully kept. The paddocks are clean. The 
scrub has not been recklessly cut. The skin of the 
land has not been blown away by the square mile. 
The trees are still there to shelter it. And amongst 
the grass and the herbage that still spring from it 
after every good rain there is scarcely a useless 
plant. 



The Best Improvement 121 

The desolation that could be wrought within 
five years by rough handling on that run — which 
has been wrought on some runs — would be irre- 
mediable. Luckily in a great service (which the 
service on the runs o£ this particular owner really 
is) they have managed to evolve just one or two 
men who understand the real Australia. 



XI 

THE GENIUS OF AUSTRALIA 

Between Gunnedah and Boggabri, overlooking the 
Namoi River, is a handsome modern homestead 
built of what seems to be rough-hewn stone. 
Actually, the blocks are not stone, but clever 
imitations in concrete. Every block was moulded 
and squared and dried on the station itself. The 
walls were built by station labour. The floor 
joists and roof beams, the wainscots and window 
frames, every atom of woodwork was fitted, 
joined, mortised by the station carpenter; some 
of it cut by the station blacksmith at the 
station sawmill. The plans were designed by the 
station owner. 

Now, imagine a country gentleman in any State 
in Europe sitting down to plan a house ; and then 
calling in the groom, butler, and coachman, with a 
gamekeeper or two, a gardener, and a lodgeman, 
and suggesting that they should manufacture and 
cut and fit the stone walls, floors, roof beams 

122 



Baronial Halls Home-made 123 

and ceilings, and then build them together 
into his baronial mansion. It is probably 
literally true that i£ he did so the statement 
of every man who heard him would be taken 
as good evidence of his insanity by the judge 
in the suit of any disappointed relatives who 
would certainly dispute his will. For those men 
simply could not begin the work; or if they 
could they would think they couldn't — which 
comes to the same thing. The Australian, too, 
has his shortcomings, a full round share of 
them, and one would be blind to deny it. 
One would be equally blind not to see that he 
possesses one virtue in a degree in which, as 
far as one has experience of them, no other 
people possesses it. He can do anything. He 
is aware of it. 

At the little centre of industry on any ordinary 
sheep run, in the ordinary day's work there will be 
men making wagons, shafts, iron hinges, gates, 
steam sawing, engine driving, forging iron, some- 
times even moulding it. The man who can do 
most of these things will not stick at a bit of 
saddling, will make a whip if necessary, or sole a 
boot. He will turn soap-boxes into furniture, 
golden syrup tins into quart pots, kerosene tins 
into anything. 

The genius of the Australian is that he can 



124 O^ the Wool Track 

make something out of nothing. Out on his 
sheep runs, ever since the time of the shepherds, 
he has had to do without the best things, 
because they don't exist there. So he has made 
the next best do, and where even they did 
not exist of themselves he has manufactured 
them out of things one would have thought 
impossible for any use at all. He has done 
it for so long that it has become much more 
than an art. It is long since a part of his 
character, the most valuable part of it. And 
the man who has that virtue in a degree to 
which no other Australian approaches, is the 
station tradesman. Next to him is the station 
hand. 

It is not in Australian natives alone that this 
great capacity exists. The roots of it seem to 
go back deep into the British stock. It is only 
necessary to listen to English as she is spoken 
about the station buildings on a Western run 
to realise it. The Australian language in the 
town is a more or less uniform modification of 
cockney.^ In the back country that accent is 



1 Americans do not drop their "h's," and the same is 
sometimes claimed for Australians. After giving considerable 
attention to it, one is reluctantly forced to the conclusion that 
this is not the case, and that the "h" is dropped to about 
the same extent in Australia as it is in England and by more 



A Specimen 125 

only one of a conglomeration of dialects which 
is taken for granted there. The city man finds 
it difficult to control his smile until he gets 
used to it. 

Here is a specimen : — 

Scene : A new northern shearing shed on which 
they were just fitting the roof beams. 

Dramatis Personce : A fair-haired nuggety ganger 
with long arms like a gorilla and iron nails and 
a hammer sticking pirate fashion around his belt ; 
the station buUocky, Jacob by name, more like a 
nugget than the ganger. Half a dozen hands of 
all sorts and sizes, mostly perched like monkeys 
about the framework of the shed. 

The ganger has been explaining to the owner 
over a plan his private ideas on the position of 
certain " possts " and the architect who planned 
them, when his gaze gradually solidifies on a 
greybeard who is hugging the top of one in a 
vain struggle to fix two beams there at the same 
time. Phonetically the conversation is something 
like this: — 

Ganger : " Noh den, dad — what you doin' 
darr ? " 

Dad (breathlessly) : " Whhat like teemberr are 

or less the same class. But the uneducated Australian stops 
short of Cockney in one respect. He does not put un- 
authorised " h's " in. 



126 On the Wool Track 

ye giein' us? These round pine pawles arr no 
use tu a man." 

Bright youngster (manoeuvring the other end of 
the pine pole) : " Shike it up, Sandy, you daownt 
want to be there awl dye." 

Ganger : " Dat's no dam good." (In a very audible 
confidence to the owner) " Dat fellow darr in de 
white trowsies, he never sunk a post in his life. 
We'll want dem odder posts to-morro', Mister. Got 
'ny sported gam ? " 

Owner (turning to the nuggety buUocky who 
is sweating under half a dozen battens he is un- 
loading from the pile of them on his waggon) : 
" Hi, Jacob ! you can fetch a load of spotted gum 
from White Dog, can't you ? How's the creek 
for crossing?" 

Jacob : " I specs I'll find bottom somewhere. I'm 
thinking dis team'U get thems tru' it." 

Ganger: ''He can bring 'em op, ye now; we 
can't do widaowt 'em, ye now " (smudges a beefy 
finger across the plan). " We'll be wantin' 'em 
yarr an' yarr an' yarr, and anodder over yarr," etc. 
etc. . . . 

Now that is just an ordinary chunk cut out of 
an ordinary conversation. The only extraordinary 
part about it is that it is not extraordinary at 
all. The ordinary conversation in the bush is a 
hotch-potch of the dialects of half the English 



A Specimen 127 

counties. The greybeard came probably from 
Peebles. The iron-grey ganger spoke English 
curiously, like a Norwegian or a Dane will speak 
it. It was a puzzle until one found that his 
particular brand came from the Orkney Islands. 

But the real puzzle is Jacob. He is just 
shouldering the last half-dozen battens, staggers 
with them to their brothers, flings them down, 
and stands panting. 

"Dats de won we ben lookin for," he says, 
taking out a pipe as nuggety as himself; "must 
have a fill." 

The Boss: "I thought you'd be feelin' it. 
Finished 'em ? " 

Jo^cob : " 'iss. Cat's de won I ben lookin' for. 
Dat's de cobbler.^ I tought we'd get 'im soon. 
I'll better be loadin' dem odder possts biforr' I for- 
get, I spec. Gee-ee Baldy. . . . Gee-ee Brown. . . ." 
And round butt the slow leading bullocks, and 
round swings the rest of the team, and round 
creaks the huge waggon squelching the mud 
aside like soft chocolate, and down the hill 
trudges the little buUocky flinging his two- 
handed whip, a trail of blue smoke fluttering 
over his shoulder, the clink of his spurs gradually 
dying away. 

^ " The last." The cobbler is the last sheep in a shearing 
pen. 



128 On the Wool Track 

"He always wears spurs/' says the boss, 

seeing that you notice them. "I dunno why; 

I don't suppose he can ride — he's an English- 
man." 

That remark may be worth a chapter to 
itself. 



XII 

THE HOMESTEAD MAN 

Jacob was an Englishman. He had left England 
so long ago that he had forgotten what the sea 
was like. But still he had kept the name of his 
birth-land. Also, in the eyes of the other hands 
on the station, he could not ride. I could not 
have told the difference — he could stick on any- 
way. But he had not learned to ride as a baby, 
and they say you are never quite the same after 
that. Jacob was an Englishman. For some 
reason they seem just to tolerate Englishmen in 
the bush. They use the word almost as a mark 
for incapacity. "He can't ride. He can graft a 
bit; but he's not much intelligence, oh no. He's 
an Englishman," they tell you. 

Yet one noticed that if there were a particularly 
hard, thankless, not over-remunerative piece of 
work to be done, something that wanted sticking 
to honestly, through a long day, with a good 
solid shoulder behind it, it was somehow generally 
an Englishman that was set to it. This particular 

129 9 



130 On the Wool Track 

one, Jacob, was pure English, from Somerset. 
He was not clever. He could write his name if 
he were not interrupted. If he were disturbed 
he had to go back and begin again. But we 
watched him loading those "possts"; and I 
never saw anyone work like him. The ''possts" 
were enormous twelve-inch baulks, stacked under 
a lot of loose timber, so that they needed to be 
pushed out clear before he could get at them 
to parbuckle them on to the wagon. Jacob 
burrowed into the pile flat on his chest, for 
all the world like a rabbit with a dog after it; 
got his shoulder up to the butt of the post 
he wanted; and then wriggled, wrenched, tore, 
shoved, as fiercely as a terrier in a dog-fight, 
until the post gradually emerged from its brothers, 
and after it — head to foot in dust, dripping with 
sweat, his huge brown muscles trembling like a 
frightened child's — four cubic feet of cast-iron 
Englishman. 

" How'd you like it if one of them fell on you, 
Jacob ? " asked somebody. 

" I spec I'd dint it," he said. Perhaps he would 
have. 

A fair proportion of the Australians who are 
described throughout these chapters were born in 
Great Britain. They do not go straight to the 
West, but they often get there after some years 



Jacob 



131 



through droving. One man — a thoroughly 
successful man — told us that he was droving 
through the North-West not long after he reached 
Australia, and happened to be sitting on a post 
in a drafting yard counting sheep which the 
boss was putting down the race to him. On 
the post opposite him sat a stranger. During 
the middle of the count they happened to look 
up, and their eyes met. The next instant they 
were off their rails and down in the yard shak- 
ing hands for all they were worth, the boss 
swearing and the sheep racing to Jericho. The 
last time they had met was as small boys in a 
lower form at Clifton College. 

People do not always look at both sides of the 
question when they're criticising the Englishman. 
He has had some calling, perhaps that of a 
ploughman or a cook, in the old country. He's 
told there's room for both up-country. So he 
comes out. 

You may see him any day in the Sydney 
streets these late years. You cannot mistake 
him. A Sydney man picks him out at once by 
his tweed cap, soft collar, turned-up trouser hem, 
the thick soles of his boots, the apple red of his 
cheeks. They are the natural signs if you come 
to think of it. The tweed cap was not meant 
for this sun. It is cold winds, not hot, that turn 



132 On the Wool Track 

the cheeks that particular sort of red. The thick 
soles and turned -up trouser hem are really a 
precaution against rain which is not falling in 
Sydney. The Sydney clerks, as they hurry along 
the pavement to the Exchange or the tea-rooms, 
tell one another that it is raining in London. 
That is a proverb in Australia. 

For about half a day the apple-cheeked boy 
straggles around town — three or four in a bunch, 
obviously shipmates, all sturdy boys, but not very 
tall — staring disconsolately up at the big buildings. 
He is obviously suspicious of the city because 
he has been carefully and very wisely warned 
by the agent general's people in London that 
these Australian capitals are places to get away 
from as soon as may be. He is a good simple 
country chap, and takes the advice earnestly. 
He grumbles at the strangeness of the land for a 
few hours. The very next morning that same 
great empty thirsty land, of which the city gives 
him no hint, has swallowed him up. He has 
gone to be a cook or a ploughman. They told 
him in England that there was room for both up- 
country. 

Now there may be lots of people up-country 
who do want cooks. One manager told us of a 
farmer he had just seen who wanted one. He 
had met him on the road and told him so. The 




g 



Cooks 133 

manager asked what sort of a cook he would 
prefer. 

" Oh, well, just a man who can kill a sheep and 
cut wood," he said, " an' do a bit of milkin', and 
perhaps fetch water. It might be a good thing if 
he was a good hand with a horse. . . ." 

That is the sort of thing which puts a cook from 
England, where society has been split up into 
sections, each one doing its own job, without 
thinking of trenching on anyone else's, for a 
time whereof the memory of man runneth not 
to the contrary, at a distinct disadvantage. And 
as for the ploughman, he can drive a furrow 
as straight as a surveyor could draw it, because 
his ancestors have done nothing else for twenty 
generations. But because he cannot milk cows 
and make four-railed fences, which don't exist 
in England, he is put straight from the ship to 
burn off dead trees under a sun that is already 
hotter than anything he has ever felt before. 
There is generally plenty of that work going at 
good wages. "They give us a job Australians 
won't do," one immigrant told us. There is 
perhaps just a fraction of truth in it. The man 
who will do a job which some Australians 
will not does not suffer for it all the same in 
the end. 

The trouble is that words do not mea,n the 



134 ^^ the Wool Track 

same thing in England and Australia. When an 
Englishman comes out as a " labourer " or '' farmer " 
or " dairy-hand '' or '' ploughman " or " groom " or 
"cook/' he does not think that he is signing on 
for active service. And yet here is a job which 
every Australian would take for granted as certain 
to come, sooner or later, in the day's work to every 
" farm labourer," '' farmer." " dairy-hand," " plough- 
man," and perhaps even to " cooks " and " grooms '* 
in the bush. Short of putting a man up and 
running a piece of iron through him, there is 
probably nothing more like real warfare in the 
world. 

It is a job that may come upon them at any 
day or hour of the summer or early autumn — 
they never know when. A lightning flash, or 
a dropped match, an unextinguished camp-fire, 
tree boughs rubbed together in the wind, even 
a broken glass bottle out on the plain with the 
Australian sun focused through it, may start 
the flames. The rest follows like a thunder- 
clap. One has seen rich men in town enjoying 
themselves in the height of the season, when 
a wire comes and they have to hurry back and 
fight a real enemy. One could not help thinking 
of the ball before Waterloo. Take one ordinary 
instance. 

A boy of twenty-three was managing a small 



In the Day's Work 135 

station. One Friday he was starting from the 
homestead to drive fourteen miles to the railway 
town (which was south of him) for the week- 
end, when he saw sailing slowly over the hills 
behind the house, about seven miles to the 
north, a little bufF-grey pearl of smoke. It 
was rising from a neighbour's paddock. As a 
matter of course he swung the buggy horses 
round and drove that seven miles to the fire to 
see if help were needed. They told him no. 
The fire was well in hand. So he turned the 
horses round again and drove into town — twenty- 
one miles. 

At seven o'clock that night a telegram came 
through to him at the hotel in the railway town 
— "Fire making head." The buggy horses were 
put in instantly. At 9 p.m. he was back at his 
own station — another twenty miles. 

He found that some of his own men had 
already walked on towards the fire without wait- 
ing to be told. With the remainder he harnessed 
up the fire-cart —the horse artillery of this sort 
of warfare, — left it to follow, saddled a fresh 
horse, and galloped to the fire — another seven 
miles. 

All night long on the flank of the fire that 
reinforcement of seven men beat at the flames, 
headed them, turned them, checked them, fought 



136 On the Wool Track 

desperately, without food or drink, in dust and 
heat and aching stifling smoke, till their eyes could 
scarcely bear it, their tongues parched, their throats 
swelled. 

They fought all that night until eleven 
on Saturday morning. They had control of the 
fire then. So they left the fire-cart with the 
men belonging to the spot for further use 
if needed, and returned to their own station 
in time for mid-day dinner. They sat over it 
for a bare half-hour when someone went out 
on to the verandah. There from the horizon, 
from the same property, from a part of it also 
about seven miles away but in a new direc- 
tion, were rising other clouds of thick black 
smoke. 

The men were willing. They made for their 
horses, scuttled down the paddock and straight 
across country ; galloped all the way — another 
seven miles. They were first in the field this 
time. The horses, two of which had been driven 
fifty miles the day before and the rest just 
galloped fourteen miles, could barely walk at the 
finish. The fire-cart was fourteen miles behind 
at the other fire; but the spring-cart came up 
with water-bags, and they began to drive the fire 
from its flank towards a road which was five miles 
ahead. And then, as soon as they could spare 



The Artillery 137 

them, they sent back two men for fresh horses 
and the fire-cart. 

It was seven more miles home with the horses ; 
seven further to the first fire, with a led horse for 
the water-cart; seven home again through the 
dark with the water-cart. And the man who 
was sent for the cart was not one of the most 
satisfactory hands on the station at peaceful times. 
But he had that cart at the homestead by eleven 
on Saturday night, and was eager to be allowed 
to take it on straight to the new fire. He was 
only dissuaded on being shown that it was im- 
possible to steer it through the bush by night. 
He was sent off* at 2 a.m. instead. He found that 
the men had fought that fire all through the 
second night. They were able to leave it at mid- 
day on Sunday. 

Now reflect on this. Neither of those fires was 
on the property on which either that manager or 
those men worked. And men are not paid for 
subduing bush fires, on the principle that bush- 
fires are not things to be encouraged. They fought 
and galloped for forty- eight hours continuously 
as a matter of fellowship; thrashing the flames 
till they were blacker than sweeps; rushing in 
upon the fire for a few moments and then retiring 
choked and breathless. Their clothes were burned. 
The hair was singed from their faces and hands. 



138 On the Wool Track 

Their eyes and throats were swollen and sore. 
Their tongues were twice the normal size and at 
times lolled out of their mouths. Such food as 
they had was brought them at their work by the 
people whose paddock was burning. Their drink 
was a little cold tea. And most of these men 
would wonder why anyone should bother to tell 
about it. For though it is fighting as hard as 
Dargai Heights, there is nothing in it that is out 
of the day's work in the bush. 

It may be ten or fifteen years after he went 
off* into that fiery school before you will see the 
apple-cheeked youngster again. When next you 
do see him, he may be a rich man or a poor 
man, a good man or a bad man ; but he will not 
be an Englishman. He carries in his mind a 
memory of Sussex dog rose hedges or Warwick- 
shire lanes. But, whether for better or for 
worse, he comes out of that life an easily recog- 
nisable Australian. 

Lord Kitchener said the other day in 
Melbourne : " A great deal of training that would, 
in the ordinary course, have to be supplied to 
obtain an efficient soldier is already part of the 
daily life of many of our lads." He went on to 
pay his hearers the very high compliment of saying 
that, as raw material for soldiers, Australians were 
the equal if not the superior of any people he 



Light Horse 139 

knew. Lord Kitchener, a little before, had seen a 
troop of light horse vanish at a gallop into thick 
bush and reappear at a gallop the next moment. 
Lord Kitchener himself relieved, at Eland's River 
in South Africa, three hundred men who without 
one gun had held on, for ten days after the 
authorities had given up their position as hopeless, 
against ten times their number of Boers planted 
with many guns on high hills all around them. 
Such qualities as Australians have a-re, of course, 
only drawn from the British race, because the people 
of Australia is as purely British as the people 
of Great Britain — perhaps more so than the 
population of London. But these qualities were 
never and never will be drawn from the race by 
the sea beaches and soft breezes, sweet fruits 
and easy hours of which the advertisements 
speak. The men who fought at Eland's River 
came spare and brown and wiry from the cattle 
stations and sheep runs of Queensland. 

Many Englishmen might not take these chances 
if they really understood what they meant. A 
Scotchman would, every time. And there is no 
doubt the Englishman stands to benefit just as 
much, whether he relishes the change at first or 
not, in a country where his future depends, as 
nearly as is humanly possible, upon his brains and 
courage and energy. 



140 On the Wool Track 

It is not the general rule that the Englishman 
is the most capable immigrant for station work. 
We generally heard that the Scotch were those 
who got on best. The German is a painstaking, 
steady farmer. But he has not got the snap in 
him that the English have. An Englishman, 
when it comes to a tussle, will do five times the 
work a German can, and do it in half the time. 
He will afterwards spend the money five times 
as quick. 

I was asking the manager of a Western run if 
it were possible for any man not bred in the 
country to become a good bushman. "The best 
bushman I ever knew,'' he said, "was an immi- 
grant — an Englishman. He is the best stockman 
I have. I can send him anywhere with sheep, 
and I know that they will be better looked after 
than if I were there myself. I've offered him 
ten shillings a week rise to stay on with me, but 
he won't. He's not dissatisfied, and he doesn't 
say anything except that he wants to go off to 
England for a bit." The manager wa*^ '.^- ' j's^siy 
puzzled. 

"He's a queer cove," he tAd. "He s?ys he 
takes these trips to England every now and then 
just for a holiday. That's all he told me.'' 

A little way along the road we met some sheep 
the manager was a little anxious about. There 



^^Best I Ever Knew'' 141 

wii>i a tall i^paro man with them, with a dark, 
pointed beard, brown cheeks, and a striking 
twinkle in his blue eyes, which gave him the air 
of iliialiiag a great deal more than he ever said. 
He had slept out on the road with the sheep the 
night before* It had been cold even indoors under 
two blankets, and by some mistake or other the 
manager had the man's rug with him in the 
buggy. 

"I was ail right," he said as he wheeled his 
horse round to leave our buggy. " I made a good 
fire, and slept close to it." And he cantered back 
to his sheep, the tails of his long overcoat flopping 
like two loose ungainly ears on his horse's flanks. 
He rode like an Australian, without leggings, in 
ordinary long blue trousers. That was the 
Englishman. 

Next day, when the coach picked us up further 
on, at the hotel, the Englishman was on it. I 
had the i-^eat next him. He was off* for his 
holidays now, and he told us so light-heartedly. 
He was a I out due for the trip, he said. The last 
trip he tool^ liome was in the drought. He was 
working on a run tlie other side of the river at 
Bourke during the drought, and he got tired of 
shuffling his horse through the dust in the 
paddocks day after day. ' It got on your nerves, 
you know/' he said. "So I just reckoned I'd go 



142 On the Wool Track 

home to England and wait till it was over. 
And that's what I did." 

"I'm going to England now," he said. "I 
suppose in about two months 111 be in London. 

Ill just slip down to B (he mentioned a 

Hertfordshire village) in the early morning; and 
my motherll find me sitting there by the fire when 
she comes down to breakfast. That's the first they 
hear of me." 

He told us how he had taken thirteen wild Irish 
Australians into a Euston public-house when the 
steamer got in early one morning and there was 
nothing else to do. He knew the girl at the 
bar there. He bought the whole thirteen drinks, 
and he stood by to watch their faces and her 
stare when they asked for the bottle (after the 
Australian custom) and she would not hand it 
to them. 

Those were the sort of amusements he drew from 
his travels around the world. 

He was the son of a farmer in one of the home 
counties. He had been an apprentice on a sailing 
ship, but the captain was too rough for his liking 
and he had left. His great friend in the village he 
came from was the son of a butler in an aristo- 
cratic house. The butler's daughter had married 
the gardener — which had been a great shock to the 
family. The butler's son had gone to America — 



On the Village Green 143 

had been there for years. And it happened that 
the two friends on one occasion returned to the old 
village together. 

Every time they returned they used to buy 
drinks for the old men of the village at the public- 
house. They would buy them beer all round and 
leave them there to finish it. But this time they 
joined together. 

"We got a teetotaler, and two barrels of beer, 
and we put them on the village green and him in 
charge of it. It was a terrible night," he said. 
"The whole village was roaring, lying about all 
over the place. I think it was looked on as rather 
a scandal. We left soon after." 

During his short holidays in England he 
had been made manager of the farm of a well- 
known peer, and he had been asked to stay 
there. He would not. He was apparently as 
straight as a bee-line, but he wanted to see 
the world. And this was his way of seeing it. 
He was an excellent worker, and so he could 
pick his work. He was going to take a winter 
in Queensland. 

" I must see New Zealand, too," he said. " It's 
the one part out here I haven't seen. You can't 
see it under twelve months. I'm going to see 
Canada and the United States afterwards." 

Perhaps he is there to-day. Probably he will be, 



144 ^^ the Wool Track 

as he said so. Only he was going to see his mother 
and his father first. 

That man, in addition to being a bushman, was 
a bushman who had never ceased to be an 
Englishman. He dressed, and rode, and worked 
like any stockman from the Four Corners. He 
was a master of Australian ways, but he had 
never become an Australian. His home and his 
thoughts were always in England. In that 
respect he was the only man of the sort that I 
ever heard of. 

Naturally, therefore, he was not in other ways 
the sort of immigrant one rneet^ every day. As a 
matter of fact, a fair proportion of the immigrants 
appear to be good men ; and a fair proportion are 
not — exactly as with Australians. We heard of 
plenty of both. Sailors make good colonists 
because they are versatile. They are to be found 
all over the country. Possibly they have not all 
arrived through the recognised channels of iminigra- 
tion. They will do any sort of work as a rule. 
"I had a fellow called Seaman George up here 
fencing for me," one Southern manager said. " He 
was sinking deep holes for the posts. He was 
very busy. Whenever I drove up he'd start doing 
handsprings all over the place. He'd such a head 
of steam on, and jumped about so much, that I 
thought at last I'd better see what was the matter. 



Seaman George 145 

We found he'd been sawing the bottom off all the 
posts and sticking them in one foot deep instead 
of four." 

One manager told us the two Royal Navy men 
were the best hands he had. On the other hand, 
they get some surprises from the army. 

A squatter instanced a groom whom he had 
engaged on the strength of his having served 
six years as a driver in the English Artillery. 
"He was civil enough," he said, "and he meant 
y/ell. But he knew nothing about horses. He 
couldn't clean a horse, he couldn't ride one, he 
couldn't even saddle it. We let him out on a 
racehorse, and he was immediately bolted with. 
He could never do anything without being told. 
He Avas just helpless." 

Of course that man was not a fair example of 
the Royal Artillery, but he was a fact. On the 
whole, it appears to be taken that the soldier 
does not make a good immigrant. His training 
seems to make him too helpless. 

The groom who took his place was an Australian. 

He wouldn't touch his cap, or say " Sir " twice in 

one day. He'd utter about three syllables in the 

course of a thirty-mile drive. But he would do 

quietly and well all that he was told — and more. 

He would sit up all the night with a sick horse 

without anyone's suggestion. Some of us went one 

10 



146 On the Wool Track 

day to the event of the month, a coursing meet in 
the nearest town. He had been as keen as anyone 
to put his bit on one of the dogs; but he never 
turned up. Later we discovered that he had 
noticed, on his way in, some sheep cut off on an 
island by a rising river. He gave up the jaunt 
on the spot, swam his horse across, and got the 
sheep out instead. They were not in the section 
of the business that belonged to him. He was 
groom, not stockman. But then he was bred as 
station hand. 

The truth is that through dealing with natives 
like that, managers are apt to be hardly fair to the 
Englishman. That extraordinary versatility, the 
capacity to do anything, is in him really ; indeed it 
is from him that it comes. But the Englishman 
has lived in water-tight compartments in a highly 
civilised country which has only reached its present 
eminence through everyone doing his own job. He 
is well fitted for the life he was born to. But for 
the bush he has one resulting defect. He has at 
first a tendency to say a thing cannot be done; 
whereas, of course, it always can. It is a con- 
venience, but at the same time it is a sign of danger 
in a community, when people begin to walk on 
the right-hand side of the footpath. They begin 
to lose the capacity for elbowing themselves 
through a crowd. That capacity obviously exists 



Hardly Fair 147 

pre-eminently in the British race. But it does not 
come out till the race gets to places like Australia, 
where it has to. There it is the genius of the race 
— the one valuable thing about us Australians, the 
one point in which, without being immodest, we 
may perhaps really claim to add our small quota to 
the precious acquirements of the world. 



XIII 

THE HOMESTEAD MAN— (continued) 

One can't help wondering, all the same, if things 
are going quite the right way in Australia. There s 
plenty to smoke a pipe over at any time one cares 
to sit on the horse-paddock fence when the red of 
evening is just left in patches between the tree 
trunks. The smoke of some contractor's fires, 
burning off, floats low along the edge of the wood. 
A boy — a tall, slender cornstalk in knicker- 
bockers with a pea-rifle over his shoulder — is 
stalking slowly through the trees. Somewhere 
down in the hollow the whistle of the sawmill 
hoots. From the homestead comes a faint, rather 
musical din. It is six o'clock, and the cook is 
banging the old plough disc which hangs outside 
the hut for a gong. The hum of the saw 
runs down and dies. The smith is putting on 
his coat, the carpenter is filling his pipe, each 
of the station hands is turning slowly home- 
wards from his work to his tea. That is the 
time to think. 

148 



On the Horse- Paddock Fence 149 

That tall, lanky boy there that passed just 
now through the edge of the bush does not look 
a precious possession perhaps. But he is. In 
a way, he is the most precious possession his 
country owns. An Englishwoman, who had lived 
in this country for many years, once gave me 
perhaps the best illustration I ever heard of the 
Australian boy. 

She was staying at a little country homestead 
about six miles from a small town. A widow 
lived there with two daughters and a little son. 
I forget the boy's age, but I think it was either 
six or eight. 

It happened one day there was some shopping to 
be done — the elder daughter wanted some ribbon 
of a particular colour, there was some harness to be 
mended, and some butter or something of the sort 
to be sold, and one or two small matters to be 
attended to. The sister could not go in, so she had 
to entrust the matching of the ribbon to her small 
brother to do for her. Early in the morning he 
went out and got the horse, harnessed up the buggy. 
His mother had given him the final instructions 
aboat the ribbon, and he had gone. 

They were sitting at dinner when they heard a 
buggy drive round to the stables. They took it 
that it was Jim back again from town, and kept 
his dinner hot for him. But he did not come in. 



150 On the Wool Track 

At last his mother went to see what was keeping 
him. 

She found him lying on his bed crying. He had 
finished his commissions. The butter was sold 
all right, the harness mended ; the ribbon was the 
right sort of blue. But he had had toothache for 
some days. He had not said anything ; but after 
he finished his commissions in town he had gone in 
to the dentist and had his tooth out. It was 
hurting him. 

If the Australian bush boy is a man before his 
years he is very much a boy too. That infant had 
gone through with his trial without telling anyone. 
But his feelings were overwrought, and he had to 
make up for it afterwards. 

In older countries people may count it against 
that boy that neither as a youngster, nor afterwards 
as a homestead man, is he forward to protest his 
loyalty to the boss; he has got a different way 
of showing any feeling that he owns to from that 
which men who have grown up in the shoes of 
feudal retainers in the older countries would use. 
But then he is not a retainer, and loyalty is not a 
feeling which he generally owns to. It is there all 
the same. For example : A younger son was 
managing a station which his father, and probably 
his grandfather, had owned before him. He had 
driven a mob of sheep into the railway to truck to 



"Go On, You Pup" 151 

Sydney, and had taken an old stockman with him 
to help muster and truck them. They rode in and 
worked through the afternoon till the sheep were 
all on the rails. But when it came to paying for 
the trucks, which had to be done before they could 
be sent away, the boy found he had forgotten his 
cheque-book. 

The station master was a new man and did not 
know the boy's name, or he would probably have 
sent the sheep on and let him post the cheque in to 
him. But he would not do so, and of course he 
was quite right in this. On the other hand, it was 
absurd to keep the sheep in the trucks for a day 
or so until the cheque-book could be fetched. The 
boy offered to draw up a cheque on ordinary 
writing paper and stamp it — that would be good 
enough. The station master would not accept 
this either. 

They were in the station master's room, and all 
the while the old station hand was looking on over 
the boy's shoulder. Suddenly he took something 
from his belt and flung it on to the table between 
them. 

" Go on, you pup," he said to the station master 
"take that!" 

It was a bag full of gold. Having no better 
place to put his savings he carried them about with 
him. There were £80 in that purse. The boy 



152 On the Wool Track 

wanted to refuse, but the old man would not 
let him. 

"Well, you had better count it here with me 
before I take any of it,'' the boy said. 

But he would not. "You will give me what 
you take," he said. He could not get over the 
station master refusing to take a cheque that would 
have gone like gold through the back country for 
forty years past. That was his way in showing 
his belief in the boss's son. 

Station hands at times will pledge more than 
their purse for a man they have served. A 
manager told us of a stockman of his who had 
lately gone into town on station business. The 
police rang up a little later to say that they had 
him in the lock-up. Amongst other things he had 
been fighting. " I suppose I ought to have sacked 
him," said the manager. " But it turned out that 
he had fought a man in a bar who had been saying 
that he would like to hammer me. You can't very 
well sack a fellow for fighting when he has been 
fighting for you/' 

To show publicly his attachment to any man is 
not a quality of the Australian. He would be 
rather ashamed to do so than otherwise. One does 
not say that it is necessarily a good point in him — 
it may be a fault in some ways. His loyalty con- 
sists rather in doing his bit — in playing fair by a 



He Can't Afford to Miss 153 

man whom he has known as his friend and mate, 
even if he was also his boss. Ifc can be understood 
that a man with that spirit makes the sort of 
lieutenant a man likes to have behind him in a 
difficulty. 

The boy that passed with his gun through the 
edge of the trees there is shooting rabbits. He 
does not miss them, because he can't afford to. On 
this particular station he gets a cartridge for every 
scalp he brings in. The few he misses he makes up 
for either with the scalps of trapped rabbits, or out 
of his money. But they are not many. It is not 
a shot-gun but a pea-rifle he is shooting with, and 
he hits four out of five. Naturally he does not go 
out to shoot rabbits, but to murder them. 

In some places, especially near the country towns, 
the boys make such big profits these last few years, 
and have such an easy time rabbit-shooting, that 
they keep away from school altogether ; and some- 
thing will have to be done about it in the near 
future. But the son of the station tradesman, as a 
rule, is a capable boy from the time he is born. 
Sometimes there is a school at the station — the 
governess lives at the homestead. Sometimes the 
children's mother or father teaches them, and in 
some cases does it excellently. They may not be 
able to tell you the name of the President of the 
French. But they can tell you what the spiders 



154 ^^ the Wool Track 

and snakes do, and how the birds build, and just 
what insects you will find under the bark of the 
gum trees along the river bank. And if later on 
you have to ask them to take cattle for you from 
Rockhampton to Cape York, as the Jardine boys 
did with the blacks hanging on to their tracks, and 
got through where explorer after explorer had 
failed, the chances are they will be able to do it. 
There is just this one difference between them and 
town boys — they have had to do something of 
everybody's work as well as their own, because the 
others were not there to do it. 

Under the circumstances it is a little strange 
that the Labour leaders of Australia have deliber- 
ately set themselves to stamp out the genius of 
Australians by making it illegal for one man to 
attempt anything more than one job or leave his 
own particular rut. They are forcing back upon 
Australia those minute cast-iron sections, the 
leaving behind of which made the genius in the 
Australian character. But they cannot force them 
on the country, because men on sheep stations are 
too far from specialists to get their work done for 
them. Consequently, as long as sheep stations 
exist there will be found, as there is found to-day, 
a set of tradesmen who can do anything for them- 
selves, and are beyond comparison the most 
capable men in Australia. 



One Great Drawback 155 

Their sons if they are educated at all are, if 
anything, more capable. But there are very few 
of them. 

It is beyond denying there is one great draw- 
back in the sheep stations as far as the good 
of the country is concerned. They employ more 
men than is generally thought, and they turn 
them out in a magnificent type. But as far as 
producing future citizens for Australia goes, they 
might as well be monasteries. They want few wives 
on the outside runs, and no children. In the West 
they allow hardly any of the hands to marry, 
because it means that the station has to allow 
rations to a man's wife and children without 
getting more work out of him. For that reason 
the big sheep station does very little towards 
populating Australia, except by providing most of 
the work and wealth on which families live in 
the towns. Whereas if smaller holdings are 
possible, although there may not be any more 
actual workers brought on to the area which used 
to be a great station, still, each of those workers is 
practically certain to mean a family and a home, 
while on the sheep run there used to be a lonely 
man. 

Should there not be some way by which these 
men, who for all their crude faults are simple, good 
men in the main, and the most capable in Australia, 



156 On the Wool Track 

might be peopling Australia with youngsters as 
strong and capable as themselves ? There must be 
a proportion of them that is fine material for share- 
farmers. Or if farming be impossible — as in the 
Far West, — might it not be wise for owners to 
recognise the political tendencies of the time, and, 
even if it means a little sacrifice, to let most of 
their hands marry ? Managers have often found 
married men easier to deal with than unmarried. 

As you pack away your pipe you wonder if we 
in Australia realise the wonderful material we 
have in the Australian handy-man. Yet we with 
our socialism are actually making an incompetent 
out of this wonderful material. . , . 

Night is closing in. There comes a thundering 
as of a cavalry regiment galloping past the paddock 
fence. The station horses are fresh from their 
green feed on the fl^ts. The noise dies, and leaves 
the station to the stars and the night wind and 
the frogs. 



XIV 

MOBILISATION— AND THE COOK 

It looked like an overloaded towel-horse. It 
stood in the grass-choked gutter, and leaned 
against the decrepit grey verandah post of the 
hotel. Everyone who stirred from time to time 
down that straggling, wide, very sleepy street 
stopped just for a moment to look at it. There 
was a sort of horse-collar of weather-beaten 
canvas looped over the forepart of it, and another 
looped over the back part, and a bulging triangle 
of canvas packed in between. Hooked on in- 
geniously to various corners were a billy, pannikin, 
water bag, and one or two unconsidered trifles. 
From somewhere in front and somewhere behind 
protruded a segment of rubber tyre. There was 
scarcely anything else to guess by. But those 
who went down that street turned their heads 
and smiled. They knew it well enough. They 
were looking for a sign of the seasons, much as 

others watch for the returning swallows. And 

167 



158 On the Wool Track 

here it was — the advance guard in the invasion of 
New South Wales. 

At this time of the year there begins a 
great movement way back in the heart of 
Australia. Far away the back country is all 
mobilising. Much later we, too, in the big 
cities on the sea begin to feel the effects of it. 
They really travel across the sea, and find every 
corner of the world in the end, only they don't 
know it. 

That wave starts in the Four Corners and along 
the innermost borders of Queensland. Some part 
of Australia is always alive with it, for by the 
time it dies on the outermost edges it is beginning 
again in the centre. It works towards the south 
and towards the sea like the stir of wind over 
the surface of a great forest. At this time of 
writing four hundred miles back they are just 
beginning to feel it; six hundred miles back the 
mobilisation is in full swing ; eight hundred miles 
back the wave has passed them — they are settling 
again. 

Have you ever seen the galahs eating across 
the face of a paddock, lined out like a fan, 
grubbing as busy as bees, the birds on the flank 
that is eaten out always flopping across and 
tacking themselves on to the flank which 
is entering new country ? That is the way. 



In a Bowler Hat 159 

each year from July to November, the shearers 
come across New South Wales. And the sign 
of them in these days is their bicycles. 

It is true some still come on the horses, some 
in sulkies, some on foot. But of late years the 
bicycle has spread through the country as fast as 
the rabbit. It is extraordinary in what unlikely 
places one finds those tyre tracks. They straggle 
across the very centre of Australia. We crossed 
them in paddocks as lonely and bare as 
the Sahara. They are ridden or driven or 
ploughed or dragged wherever men can go, 
and not infrequently where men cannot go. 
They shear through mile after mile of red 
sandhill; they wander between the great river- 
side trunks, over a debris of twigs and splinters 
and burrs which must have crackled under 
the wheels for twenty-five miles at a stretch. 
But the bicycle gets through — if the man 
does. 

The shearer sets out on these trips exactly 
as if he were going from Sydney to Parra- 
matta. He asks the way, lights his pipe, 
puts his leg over his bicycle, and shoves off*. 
For precisely the same trip the average 
European would probably requisition a whole 
colonial outfit, compasses, pack-horses, pugaree, 
sun spectacles, and field - glass. The native 



i6o On the Wool Track 

Australian takes it like a ride in the park. 
If he is city-bred, like many shearers, the 
chances are he starts in a black coat and 
bowler hat, exactly as if he were going to tea at 
his aunt's. When Professor Gregory's party went 
with its camels and cases of provisions, green 
umbrellas, and water-bags, and the proper ex- 
plorer's outfit, to search for something they call 
the "Dead Heart of Australia," the rest of the 
party, being told that it was madness to attempt 
the journey at the time, provided themselves with 
pith helmets and tropical clothes. But they had 
an Australian cook. The helmet in which he 
chose to explore the centre of Australia was a 
"hard-hitter." He did not particularly affect it. 
Only it never struck him to change it. 

It is said that on the innermost goldfields 
of Western Australia there are rumours of men 
having turned up quietly and begun work who 
never reached there from the West, but who 
had made their way across from the eastern 
States, and had finished, as a matter of course, 
without making of it anything out of the 
ordinary, a journey which, if an explorer had 
made it, would have become a bit of Australian 
history. That is probably only a rumour. But 
what is certainly a fact is that many of these 
wanderers — not to speak of the real bushmen 



The Genius of Makeshift i6i 

such as bring stock from the Territory or the 
Gulf — in the ordinary course of their livelihood, 
have accomplished (in other cases undoubtedly 
have lost their lives in attempting) journeys 
more deserving to be recorded than some of which 
the memorials stand in great places in the great 
cities of this country. 

And so from out of those solitudes, during a 
certain week a little before the spring, there begin 
to appear — leaning against the huts around the 
big bare shearing sheds that stand out somewhere 
toward the heart of Australia — bicycles. There 
is not a bicycle shop within two hundred and 
fifty miles. But bicycles turn up all the same. 
Some have brand-new tyres, full of air. Others 
are full of rope. 

There is a burr along the Darling which 

cuts the back of the shearer's hand as it works 

through the fleece. It even sticks into cricket 

balls, and makes them painful to pick up. It 

cuts bicycle tyres into strips. It goes by the 

name of binde-i. If you look carefully at the 

bicycles that come in you will notice that some 

of their tyres appear curiously lumpy. The 

rider has foreseen trouble to them, and has got 

on his way a kangaroo hide and slit it into 

lengths, which he has bound round the rim. 

Often, when punctures grow too many to mend, 

11 



i62 On the Wool Track 

they stuff rope or strips of basil inside the 
tyre. 

But the most hopeless accident that can happen 
to a bicycle is for the front fork to snap off. 
Probably the front wheel buckles in the same 
smash. The back fork would not be quite so 
hopeless, because it is easier to jury-rig a fixed 
wheel. But the front wheel has to work on a 
pivot, balancing and steering the rider all the 
time. When a front fork breaks the average 
cyclist would think the only thing left was to sit 
down and weep. 

But there has wobbled up to a Western shed 
before now a strange thing — a complicated 
arrangement of tree branches and fencing wire. 
A front wheel waggles like a drunken man 
between two solid supporting saplings, which 
are bound to the debris of a fork with wind- 
ing after winding of fencing wire. Across 
the drunken wheel itself are two battens of 
wood, nailed like a cross. There was a smash 
somewhere out there on the sandhills, in which 
a rider found himself on the ground, lucky 
not to have lost his life, with broken bits 
of a bicycle around him. But he picked him- 
self up and set to work. And in the end he 
steered it — stayed out, tied up, bandaged, propped, 
secured, jury-rigged like a ship, grinding like 



The Four Corner Slang 163 

a chafFcutter, but still a bicycle — safely into 
port. 

What a hold the bicycle has taken on them may 
be guessed from their language; for in the real 
bush language, out-back, they borrow their phrases 
from the things they see around them, and the 
language is therefore not vulgar, but immensely 
expressive. It is true that in one part of the 
back country they speak another bush language, 
which is a silly affectation. Luckily it does not 
extend very far from its present home up in the 
Four Corners. It consists in substituting for 
some common words other particular words 
which rhyme with them. 

"Look out you don't lose your old barrel of 
fat" means "Mind you don't lose your hat." 
Shirt is probably "old lump of dirt," and pony 
"Pat Maloney." How that stupid, feeble rubbish 
passes as clever amongst people really full of 
dry humour, it is hard to understand. They are 
easily chaffed out of it. 

But the real bush language is full of point. 
When they tell you Burns had not fought 
Johnson for two minutes before he punctured, 
it is like painting a picture. There is no 
more common expression than that to-day in 
the bush. And yet only the other day it was 
a country purely and simply of horses — where 



164 On the Wool Track 

men talked, loved, almost lived horses, as they 
still do nearer to the sea. But in the West 
there is no room for regrets. If a thing has 
advantages it has got to be used — as the camel 
had. And for the shearers' intermittent trips 
there is nothing like bicycles. They were even 
used by boundary riders in some paddocks during 
the drought. And they have forced themselves 
into the language. 

So the bicycles gather outside the hut. Some 
are like prehistoric peeps; others are sleek with 
new enamel ; but on every one, doubled and tied 
fast over the handles and front fork, and often 
over the carrier and back fork as well, as tight 
and snug and curly as a white garden grub, is 
the conventional swag. The swag is probably 
the lineal descendant of the cavalryman's kit 
bent over his saddle bow, or the infantryman's 
overcoat slung round him like a horse collar. 
At any rate, it looks like it. It is always 
rolled and strapped in three places with 
particular care. It has usually a canvas tent- 
fly for the outside roll, or a length of American 
leather; sometimes a warm rug of 'possum 
skins, home-stitched and tanned, leather side 
outwards. 

The shearers are concentrating. The sheep are 
being moved in. For one hundred miles on every 



The Concentration 165 

side and more everyone knows that on Friday- 
shearing begins at a famous shed. The news may 
not even have been noticed by the great city 
newspapers. But it is a very engrossing big 
business out there. It is more like a campaign 
than anything else. 

Orders have to be sent out weeks before to the 
back stations to have the different detachments of 
sheep marched in to certain places at certain dates. 
Regiment after regiment has to be shifted in like 
troops at a big military concentration. The stages 
by which they come are left more or less to the 
overseers and their musterers. But the main 
outlines of the campaign have to be sketched 
by the manager. He may perhaps alter the 
dates, order them to slow down or hurry up a 
day or two, as the shearing progresses. But 
there is generally little change. When the 
final order arrives to have the sheep from 
White Dog paddock in at Emu paddock on 
Wednesday week, at Emu paddock on Wednesday 
week the sheep must be, or somebody will hear 
of it. 

For it ms^y be on that very day, or it may be a 
day or two later, they will send from the station 
to fetch 5000 or 6000 of those sheep into the 
woolshed paddock, so that a thousand or two may 
be put immediately into the shed, and perhaps 



1 66 On the Wool Track 

others under it, if it looks like rain. If they are 
not there shearing may have to stop until they 
arrive. And that is a fiasco ; for the rouseabouta, 
the pickers-up, and sweepers, and tarboys, and 
the rest are paid by the day, and have to go 
on being paid whether there is shearing or not; 
and the shearers, who are not being paid when 
not shearing but who are paying for their own 
food, become naturally restive. The shearers' 
point of view we heard clearly put in a railway 
carriage : 

"'Ear of the strike at Simpinbrook's — Butta- 
loola ? " asked a voice behind a pipe. " Shearers 
all come out. Reckon they'd a right, too. 'E 
couldn't keep the sheep up to 'em. I guess it's 
a fair thing to keep the bosses up to it. Bosses 
keep the men up to it all right." 

"Bad management somewhere," put in a voice 
behind a second pipe. 

" Bad management everywhere," puffed the first 
pipe. " 'E's a child at the game, that Simpinbrook. 
'E didn't ought to 'ave a station at all. . . ." 

That is what the shearers think of incompetent 
generalship. On a big, well-managed run the 
week before shearing the boss has probably 
at least three bodies of sheep on the move in 
various parts of the run. "There's one lot 
moving in at the present time from a paddock 



Cooks 167 



on a back station ninety miles away," we were 
told by one manager. 

So much for the autocracy — the run. Down 
by the shed a small republic is forming. The 
autocracy gets through its business by simply 
despatching orders. The republic does nothing 
without a meeting. The most important meet- 
ing is one of the first. It is for the election 
of the cook. 

Round the back country at this time of year, 
depending on their reputation, more or less, for 
their employment, in the hope of a job at the 
various sheds, there wander a certain number of 
reputed cooks. Some of them are pastry-cooks 
from the towns, some of them are sea cooks, 
some have learned cooking by helping shearers' 
cooks, some are not cooks at all. But as 
shearers provide all the food, and pay the cook 
four shillings a week per man for simply cook- 
ing it, and more than that in the very Far West, 
the job is worth having, and the cooks sometimes 
surprisingly good. 

It is an anxious life for the cooks. Probably to 
a big shed the shearers come in batches from two 
or three sheds that have lately cut out, and with 
several of them comes a cook, each with a good 
backing. Their names are put up at the meeting — 
men tell what they know of the reputation of each. 



1 68 On the Wool Track 

A vote is taken, and after it one cook settles down 
to earn anything up to £5 a week, for a couple of 
months. The others pack disconsolately, and 
wander round the country on a precarious hunt for 
another shed. "Beat by a blanky rouseabout," 
they will tell you in the railway carriage; "a 
blanky ofFsider that was workin' under Jo Donovan 
at Tiltabunda." An "ofFsider," by the by, is a 
gentleman who is learning bullock-driving, and 
who is allowed to try his apprentice tongue on the 
offside of the bullock team. The term is trans- 
ferred to the assistant whom the cook must engage 
at a big shed, and who, from being allowed to 
experiment on the shearers, often becomes a cook 
himself. The cook is expected to allow the ofFsider 
Is. 4d. per head — a third out of the whole sum he 
himself receives. 

"Beat by a blanky ofFsider, that 'ad some 
mates there," says the disappointed one con- 
fidingly. "Well, there ain't no chance for the 
old 'uns. What I say is a young man will 
beat an old 'un three times out of four. You 
don't know what shed my mate Jo 'Uggins 'as 
got, do yer?" 

None of the shearers in the compartment knows 
of Jo 'Uggins. 

" 'E's my mate. 'E's an old 'un, but I reckon he's 
the best cook in all Australia, Jo 'Uggins is. 



^^Beat by an Offsider'' 169 

Wonder where 'e is. I'm goin' to Kukuburra 
myself/' 

" So are we/' says a shearer. " But I 'ear they've 
got a cook there." 

" Why, they don't begin till Monday," says the 
old 'un. " They 'aven't elected their cook yet." 

"No, but it's shearin' by contract, and the 
contractors have appointed one." 

It came as a visible blow to the old 'un. 

" That's all you know ! " he exclaimed. " Where 
do the shearers come in? They'll have some- 
thing to say to it, an' don't you make no blanky 
errors." 

But one noticed he did not leave the carriage 
at Kukuburra. And when the train was draw- 
ing in to its terminus at Cobar he was still 
muttering to himself his opinion of those 
contractors. 

" I reckon I'd better stay 'ere a fortnight an' see 
what turns up," he said as he lifted down his swag 
from the rack. 

That is the rather precarious sort of trade on 
which the shearers' cook depends. When he is 
once elected he can be ousted by another meeting, 
it is true. But it is not easy to oust him, because 
generally his competitors have gone their way to 
other sheds. 

"We elected a bloke" — so it was explained to 



170 On the Wool Track 

us — "in our last shed, Rockheath, in Queensland. 
'E come from the Isle of Skye off the coast of 
Scotland, 'e said. I dunno why they elected 'im, 
except it was there was only three candidates 
an' they knew the other two. Anyway, 'e was 
chosen. 

''They 'ad him for three weeks, an' then they 
couldn't stand 'im. A terrible dirty fellow they 
thought 'im. I'm not sayin' 'e couldn't cook ; but 
they reckoned he didn't change 'is singlet for three 
weeks. 

"So they 'eld a meeting an' decided to give 
'im a bit of a chance — give him a hint like, 
just to shake 'im up. Well, he changed 'is 
singlet all right, an' we reckoned 'e smoogged for 
a bit after that. But it wasn't any good. 'E wore 
the second singlet for a week. So they 'eld another 
meeting and shifted 'im. 'E didn't like goin', but 
they told 'im 'e'd better roll up his swag, quick and 
lively. An' off he went. 

"There was another bloke there that 'ad been 
laying on terrible 'ard 'ow 'e could cook. There 
wasn't anyone else, so they elected 'im. 'E was 
clean enough all right. But 'e couldn't cook. 'E 
couldn't even bake a blanky brownie.^ It wasn't 
a week before they was wishin' they 'ad the old 

1 "Brownie" is a sort of loaf which most country 
Australians can bake for themselves. It has raisins in it. 



A Man of Mark 171 

one back. But it was too late to do anything then 
— excep' growl." 

The chief thing a shearers' cook has to be good 
at is baking bread. The next thing he has to be 
good at is fighting. Every shearer admits that it 
is an advantage to a cook if he can use his hands. 
" You know, there's always some in the mess 
that's ready to grumble however well he cooks. 
And it just makes the difference if they know he's 
game to call them out and tan them." They tell 
of one very brawny cook who determined to 
put things on a proper footing from the start. At 
the first dinner he marched into the hut with his 
sleeves rolled up and the knots on his arms well 
displayed, and planted the dinner decisively on 
the table. 

"There's your tucker, gentlemen," he said. 
" You can have a piece of that or you can have a 
piece of the cook." 

He folded his arms and waited. It was the 
tucker they chose. 

The day before shearing starts the roll is called. 
Shearers have probably written for months before 
to book stands. If their name is recognised as that 
of any man who has given trouble in former years, 
they are probably refused. Otherwise a stand is 
booked for them. Generally they deposit £1, 
which, if they do not turn up, is forfeited, and 



172 On the Wool Track 

sometimes sent in their name to the nearest 
hospital. 

The shearers, being a republic, elect a repre- 
sentative — " the shearers' rep." — who is their go- 
between in every dealing with the station officials 
whilst shearing lasts — a sort of tribune of the 
people. On this same day the local storekeeper 
often turns up with his best raisins and tea and 
sugar, and tenders for the contract to supply 
the hut with groceries. The station store pro- 
duces one list of prices and the local store- 
keeper another. The republic decides which it 
will deal with. 

In most parts of the West butter is something 
of a luxury. But it may be that on this same 
day shearer one, smoking on the fence, turns to 
shearer two, smoking over the gate, and asks: 
"What's the matter with butter twice a week, 
Sam ? '' And Sam answers : " Well, I reckon it's 
worth it, myself ; how about bacon and eggs on 
Saturdays ? " 

Possibly someone else joins them; and they 
stroll over and find the " rep.," who calls a meeting 
and puts the question to it. They sit in parlia- 
ment over the motion ; and if no amendment is 
suggested, and there are nineteen in favour of 
it and eighteen against it, they order butter twice 
a week and bacon and eggs on Saturdays. If 



The Republic 173 

there are eighteen for and nineteen against, they 
do not. 

Now, these incidents may be trivial. But if 
they give any clue to the great independent 
currents that flow underneath the surface and 
really settle the fate of the greatest industry in 
Australia, they may have been worth repeating. 



XV 

UNDERCURRENTS 

" Yes, we all meet here once a year," said the wool- 
classer, confidentially waving a comprehensive hand 
over the bent backs of some twenty or thirty 
shearers, which were beginning to grow very 
stiff and creaky and painful towards the end of 
the first day's shearing; "we all meet here, and 
we don't know one another. There's no love 
and affection and harmony between us. It's 
like getting a team of bullocks to pull together. 
They're poling on one another all the time, you 
might say. 

" I come into the shed here, and I see a man I'll 
be working with for six weeks. I say ' Good 
morning, Tom.' We're here every day for six 
weeks together, and that's all I can say to him 
all the time. Just ' Good morning, Tom.' You 
see, if I was to make myself more friendly he'd 
begin to try on. They begun to try on this 
morning, the £rouseabouts ; put on their coats, 
and began to walk off with the shearers when 

174 



"The Place a Shed is" 175 

I wanted them here. I have to be on the 
look-out for them trying on from the first day 
of shearing to the last. It seems to go pleasant 
enough on the surface, but it's fight, fight, 
fight all the time underneath. That's what a 
shed is." 

We were standing at one end of the long 
passage way that goes by the name of the board. 
It always seems to be rather dark in a shear- 
ing shed — perhaps only by contrast with the 
fierce glare of the sunlight on the Australian 
plain outside, gleaming through every crack and 
fogging every doorway. Anyway, it was dark 
just then. The grease in the wool takes no 
time to polish every plank and post in the 
shed a mellow oily brown. Such light as shone 
in, one could see reflected in the dull buff" floor 
as in ice. It glinted softly from the polished 
side of the pens, from the great polished tree 
trunks supporting the roof, from the tiny droning 
steel machines, from the long steel shaft and 
wheels always turning, turning above them. 
And it showed up softly the shiny brown 
muscles, the white singlets, and blue and green 
and red republican jerseys of the shearers as 
they peeled off* the fleece from each fat, impotent, 
struggling sheep, much as a housewife peels 
a potato. 



176 On the Wool Track 

For some reason the process of peeling, particularly 
with such a remorseless, irresistible implement as a 
shearing machine, is always a fascinating process 
to watch. One stood there dreamily spell-bound as 
the shiny brown forearm steered patiently over 
wrinkle after wrinkle, buried sometimes well over 
the wrist in the wool through which it ploughed — 
so deep that one swore it must have gone through 
a jugular this time at any rate. Time after time 
one caught one's breath whilst the cutter sailed over 
the eyes and the knee-pads — sometimes leaving a 
red stain to develop behind it, usually leaving the 
body the shorn clean white of a peeled orange. 
From the pens behind the board came the con- 
sistent scuffle of sheep. A couple of rouseabouts, 
yelping like puppies and rattling tin-cans on iron 
hoops, were drafting sheep from a passage packed 
like a sardine tin into the pens behind the shearers 
as they became empty. Then a steam whistle 
hooted. 

For a moment nobody seemed to have noticed it. 
Then a shearer down the board straightened his 
back painfully, hung up his machine, put on his 
coat, and stepped out of the shed. After him 
another, and another. As each man finished his 
sheep and rammed it down the shoot at his side, he 
knocked oiF. From the doorway came the click of 
teacups. Within five minutes the last shearer had 



Lunch 177 



finished. The hum of the machines ceased. The 
engine slowed down, stopped, began to hiss softly 
with escaping steam. The picker-up raced off to 
the wool tables with the last fleece. The sweepers 
busied themselves for a minute or two. And then 
the shed was deserted. 

The wool-classer, the " boss of the board," and 
one of the " experts " were strolling across to their 
cottage. A few of the shearers were stringing over 
to the hut. But most of them — old men, young 
men, tall men, short men, fine straight upstanding 
men, delicate men, strong faces, weak faces, clean 
faces, sodden faces, men in every sort of coat and 
jersey, in old boots, in new boots, in tan boots, in 
patent leather boots, in button boots, men with 
patched pants, men with their pants tucked into 
their socks, men with their trousers stained and 
frayed, men with their trousers creased and turned 
up — were sitting on the steps leading up to the 
wool-shed (a shed always has a floor raised on 
posts about five feet from the ground), or on the 
fence, or on the wood-pile for the engine, drink- 
ing tea. A slender young fellow was handing 
round in a tray an assortment of rather pale 
white pastry. 

It was four o'clock : and from four to four-thirty 

is the half-hour spell when the shearers make their 

cook send them up something to eat as well as their 

12 



178 On the Wool Track 

tea. They had had tea twice before that day in 
the two shorter spells of twenty minutes each, which 
came one between breakfast and dinner, and the 
other between dinner and lunch. But the tea was 
only sent up then in a billy with a tin pannikin to 
dip into it. This lunch is a formal affair. It is 
generally called '' lunch " when it is called anything, 
because the midday meal is, of course, '* dinner," 
and the evening meal has appropriated the name 
of " tea '' ; and it is hardly dignilSed for red 
republics to indulge in such an aristocratic vice as 
" afternoon tea." 

Shearers are sometimes laughed at for their 
frequent meals. Perhaps they are not an absolute 
necessity. But, at any rate, very few of the people 
who treat themselves to morning tea and afternoon 
tea deserve them as the shearers do. Shearing may 
be well-paid work, and the conditions are good 
enough; but no one attempts to deny that it is 
real hard work — eight hours of sweating, aching, 
vibrating work, carried through honestly at top 
pressure. It is well-paid piecework, which is the 
ideal sort of work. There's a good deal of grumble 
about shearing, both from the shearers and their 
bosses. But if all the work in the country were 
carried through as strenuously as shearing is, 
Australia would be a very much richer and more 
comfortable place for everyone in it. 



It's Not in the Contract 179 

When work started again after the short spell on 
the first afternoon, the backs that bent over the 
sheep were stiffer and creakier than ever. One 
youngster was obviously in diflBculties. The 
overseer — " the boss of the board/' as he is called — 
was for some time standing quietly watching him 
struggling with a sheep, nibbling at the fleece with 
the machine rather than shearing it, making a 
" second cut," that is, shearing by instalments, 
leaving the wool too long, and going over it con- 
scientiously a second time, so that the beautiful, 
long, even staple was minced into short lengths. He 
was obviously ruining the fleece, committing half a 
dozen mistakes at once because his back was a 
lively lumbago, and at least a dozen others because 
he was being watched. The "boss of the board" 
did not dress him down and dismiss him, as one 
half expected he would do. He walked on instead, 
and pretended to have seen nothing. Presently, 
from the other end of the board, we saw the 
youngster step across to the wall and put on his 
coat. 

" May they knock off* when they wish ? " I asked 
presently. 

"It's not in the contract," said the boss. 
" They're supposed to shear on till the shed stops. 
But it's the first day, and he's feeling it pretty bad. 
It's better for me not to see. That young fellow is 



i8o On the Wool Track 

a * learner/ He's never shorn before, except, 
perhaps, as a rouseabout. The shearers, when the 
whistle goes, sometimes let the rouseabouts finish 
for them the sheep they happen to be on. The 
boss won t let 'em do so in some sheds. But they 
must begin some time, I suppose, mustn't they ? 
Well, this fellow's just learning. And he's been 
having a real bad time." 

Presently one noticed the *'boss of the board" 
step up to the man, who was leaning disconsolately 
against the wall, and say a few words to him. 
They spoke quietly for a moment. Then the 
youngster left the shed. 

"He's a good chap, a real trier," said the boss, 
returning. 

By this time, when the men bent down over 
each new sheep, you could almost hear their backs 
creaking, cre-ee-eaking like doors on rusty hinges. 
After the sheep was finished something would 
have to be repaired in the machine — some screw 
tightening or the comb and cutter readjusting. 
The men could stand with their backs straight 
whilst doing it. It was wonderful how regularly 
it happened, and how long it took. When next 
they bent their backs it looked as if something 
was bound to give way if they got much stiffer. 
And it did. 

It happened that the day before there had been 



m. 



Breaking Point i8i 

about three points of rain. A good many of the 
sheep had been already in or under the floor of the 
shed, and remained dry. But something like an 
hour and a quarter before they had come to the 
end of these, and the sheep with which the pens 
had been filled since then were sheep which had 
been out whilst it was spitting the day before. 
The owner took care to be in the shed when 
the shearers first handled these particular sheep, 
and he looked a bit anxious. But as they went 
on shearing them without objection up to the 
ensuing spell he breathed easier again, and went 
out and sat on the fence of the drafting yard 
and lit a cigar. 

About a quarter of an hour after work was 
resumed a shearer half-way down the board stopped 
and hung up his machine. 

The slip of a boy shearing next to him looked 
up. " Reckon they're wet ? '' he asked. 

The first shearer was putting on his coat. He 
nodded. 

" I've been thinking so too, this half -hour," said 
the youngster. 

It spread down the shed just like fire in stubble. 

" What's up ? " one man would ask. 

"Wet sheep." 

" They reckon the sheep are wet. Bill," says the 
inquirer to his mate down the line. 



1 82 On the Wool Track 

Five minutes later the owner, cigar and all, 
strolled up to the wool-press. 

" Hullo, what's up ? '' he asked, looking down the 
shed beyond. 

The wool-classer was still there with a dozen 
assorted fleeces rolled up, and laid like huge woolly- 
ostrich eggs on the table in front of him. The 
piece-pickers were at their tables on either side of 
him, and the wool-rollers busy at their tables in 
front of him like school-boys under the eye of a 
master. A solitary sweeper was shoving a clothes- 
basket, bulging with ragged wool, down the board 
in front of him as a porter shoves a trolley. But 
the shearers were gone. The boss didn't need to 
be told. He knew. 

And there one comes to a conflict that rages 
eternally. It's as old as the oldest shearing shed ; 
and it may be that the youngest shed that ever 
stood on posts will have been long since burned 
for firewood before it is settled. Beyond any 
doubt a great number of shearers honestly believe 
that if they shear wet sheep, particularly if the 
sheep is hot from driving and has the yolk thick 
in his wool, and the man himself is hot from 
shearing with all his pores open, they will in 
some way be poisoned. They do not mean by 
this poisoning the rheumatism from which anyone 
that way inclined will naturally be likely to suffer 



Wet Sheep 183 

after this or any other wetting. What they 
believe in is a special, sort of poisoning with effects 
very much like rheumatism; and they explain it 
in the language of a patent medicine advertise- 
ment, or a Shakespearean doctor, as being caused 
by some vapours or humours rising from the wool 
and entering the man's skin when he is hot. That 
is theory. 

I only heard three shearers give a definite 
opinion about wet sheep. The subject rose in 
the train. 

An elderly refined-looking farmer sat in one 
corner. He was an intelligent, well-educated man, 
with a quiet voice which made you listen — a 
believer in scientific farming and land taxation, 
among other things. He was going West with 
his swag, looking for a shed in his slack season. 
Opposite him, also with his swag, also looking 
for work in a Western shed, also perhaps a farmer, 
was a hard little nut of a Cornishman. In a third 
corner lounged a stout, good-humoured country- 
man, who, for the time, was a drover, and who, 
in a husky, good-natured voice, offered one the 
best tips he had with regard to whisky-headaches 
and women. He did not seem much afraid of 
either. 

The good-humoured countryman had been hold- 
ing forth also on wet sheep. He didn't blame 



1 84 On the Wool Track 

men for knocking off. He'd heard of cases of 
illness. He'd only known one, but it was bad 
enough for him. 

"'E was a young fellow," he said slowly, "and 
'e shore 'em when they were wet and 'e was 
hot. 'E took ill after. His fingers and legs 
and arms w's all cramped up. 'E was in the 
hospital twelve months, and 'e come out crippled 
for life. 

"The worst of it, it's very 'ard to know when 
the sheep are wet," continued the gentleman. 
" It's only those that knows can tell it. They feel 
'em on the brisket. I couldn't tell myself if a 
sheep was wet or not, and the shearers can't hardly 
tell themselves sometimes." 

That was puzzling and interesting and worth 
pursuing. But the good - natured gentleman 
reached his journey's end and had to get out. 
And for the moment the Cornishman in the corner 
was engaged on something even more interesting 
than a discussion of wet sheep. 

He was tearing off the corner of a daily paper, 
and the farmer was watching him. Then he 
borrowed the farmer's tobacco pouch, took a fill, 
rolled it thoughtfully in his two palms. Shearers 
are generally rolling plug. But this one was 
rolling it out, not packing it. Finally he roughly 
squared off a bit of newspaper the size of his 



Bush 'cadia 185 

hand, wrapped it cigarette- wise around the tobacco, 
licked it to make it stick, put it in his mouth, 
and began to smoke the Sydney Morning Herald. 
Perhaps one was staring pretty hard, for he 
looked up. 

" Haven't seen one of that sort before ? " he 
asked. "Some of us get into the way of it, 
out here. Couldn't smoke one of yours now if 
you oifered it to me. Call 'em 'bush 'cadias.' 
It grows on you. I'm not sayin' it does a 
fellow much good. I'm trying to knock it off 
myself." 

Now "bush 'cadia" is short for bush Arcadia, 
and that is a pretty fine tribute to J. M. Barrie 
when you think it out. 

When I had sufficiently recovered I gave another 
jog to the subject of the wet sheep. The refined- 
looking farmer jumped at it. 

" Look," he said, " I've been shearing forty years 
now. So you may guess I ought to know some- 
thing about it. Well, I've shorn sheep dry and 
sheep wet many and many a time — and I never 
had anything wrong with me yet. 

"I did know one case — a farmer and his son. 
They were shearing and wanted to get through. 
There were thirty sheep out in the rain, and 
they brought them in and penned them. The 
old man he shore more than the young fellow 



1 86 On the Wool Track 

and never had anything go wrong. But the 
young fellow's arms swelled up, and he had to 
get into the hospital. He was very bad for 
twelve months. 

"Well — there you have it. I've an idea that 
when a man shears a wet sheep it is all right 
so long as the sheep is cool. Even if the sheep's 
hot it doesn't hurt if a fellow goes about it 
easily. But a man somehow can't help working 
for all he's worth when he's shearing — and if 
a man gets sweating and holding wet sheep 
he may perhaps get poisoned. I've seen men 
shear wet sheep scores of times, all the same 
— especially towards the end of shearing, when 
they have booked stands in another shed, and 
want to get away to it. The sheep are never 
wet then. 

"It's when the shed is near a town or a hotel 
that the sheep get wet. Someone hangs up his 
machine, and no one likes to stand out. There's 
a majority, and they knock off. I've seen them 
knock off three days for a point or two of rain 
when a shed started. At the end of the same 
shearing it had rained heavily, but one day was 
enough to dry them then. It all means that a 
fellow who doesn't want to work gets his way, 
and the fellow who's there to knock out a 
big cheque loses two or three days. You may 



"A Myth" 187 

reckon this as a safe thing, anyway — that if 
the wool is dry enough to press, it is dry enough 
to shear." 

One had been looking at the Cornishman. By 
his looks he was republican of republicans, a 
typical horny - handed shearer, with a strong 
nuggety chin and high sun-browned cheek-bones. 
He had just been quoting the union rules as 
reverently as if they were the laws of Moses. 
One was waiting for him to cut short this heresy 
with something pretty florid and forcible. At 
last he did speak. He knocked the ash off his 
"bush 'cadia," and in slow, quiet Australian 
said: 

" I think wet sheep are a myth. I don't think 
anyone suffers through shearing them. I don't 
think most shearers believe in them. They do 
when they want a spell. Two doctors followed 
the question through from Riverina to New 
Zealand last year, and said that every complaint 
of illness from wet sheep reported to them could 
be traced to some previous trouble. There's 
hundreds of men besides shearers has rheumatism, 
aren't there ? If a man is inclined to rheumatism 
he naturally gets it after getting wet or even 
before if there's rain in the air — whether he's a 
shearer, or whether he's not. So it works out 
this way: There might be thirty men in a shed 



1 88 On the Wool Track 

who could all shear wet sheep without any 
danger, and one whom the wet would affect. 
Well, they all had to knock off for him. That's 
what 'wet sheep' is." 

One heard dozens of remarks, which took it 
for granted that wet sheep are dangerous. And 
no doubt it was only a chance that the only 
opinions one heard argued were the other way. 
The shearers are divided on the point (as are 
the squatters themselves), and it is a never-ending 
argument amongst them. But one thing was 
significant. Neither of the men who did not 
believe in the danger of wet sheep made any 
pretence that they would attempt to stand up for 
their opinion when the question arose in a shed — 
even if the sheep were not wet. 

"What's the use if there's a majority against 
you ? " they asked. 

If wool is shorn when it is wet and pressed 
into bales whilst it is still wet, it is apt to heat 
and burn by chemical action — "spontaneous com- 
bustion," as they call it. Whether it is dangerous 
or not, it is impossible to shear sheep when they 
are really wet, and the question does not arise. 
But whether, if the wool is dry enough to pack, 
there may still be really some microbe or poison 
in it which could possibly injure a man holding 
it firmly between his legs as shearers do, or even 



A Question for Scientists 189 

any real danger of rheumatism, a scientist could 
no doubt settle within a single season if he were 
asked to do so. 

He would decide the point, which would be 
quite a different thing from settling it. '' For," as 
the wool-classer said at the beginning, " that's the 
sort of afplace a shed is." 



XVI 

HONESTY 

Next morning the big shed dozed as innocently 
under its dazzling creeping iron roof as if "wet 
sheep" had never been heard of. Inside the 
machines hummed, the belt slap-slapped, the 
shaft always turned, the shearers sweated. Out- 
side, in the sleepy glare, two men, manager and 
jackeroo, were bolting from the counting-out pens 
under the shed the poor, skinny, undignified, 
decrepit sheep. The shearer, as he finishes each 
sheep, slides it down a shoot at his side into his 
particular one of a series of small pens underneath. 
And now a boy was emptying the pens. As 
each batch cleared the gate, with bleeding noses, 
patched eyes, stiff as wire, with the stagger of 
inebriated slum ladies and the solemnity of 
centenarian parrots, the poor silly fools jumped 
high, jumped and jumped again, as if it were 
part of the formula. And during this per- 
formance they were counted and credited to the 

shearer who owned the pen. Presently, for a 

190 



A System 191 

good-bye, each was branded like a sugar-bag 
with what looked, and apparently felt, like hot 
tar. If there were ticks or other pests in that 
country he would have been dipped a little later, 
bolted down a race, and betrayed by a sort of 
oubliette into a bath of sheep dip. But here there 
was no need. They strung eagerly from the 
gate of the shorn sheep paddock into the limitless 
West again. 

And all the while the shed was humming ; and 
always on the green flat below, watched by one 
silent horseman, there waited one of the famous 
flocks of the world. 

The people of that shimmering Central 
Australian run had noticed that when their 
wool in due course reached London there was 
always one man who waited for one particular 
section of it, and snapped it up as soon as it was 
offered. They inquired at last. He was a 
manufacturer of a particular cloth for billiard 
tables. 

Now that had little to do with the sheep, for 
there were plenty like them in Australia. It was 
really the result of a certain honesty of system 
which still marks most British commerce — a wise, 
honest system which voluntarily tells the buyer 
exactly what he is getting. It is " grading " in 
some trades, and "classing" in this. It is true 



192 On the Wool Track 

that to describe a process is to give no conception 
of shearing — which is a long diplomatic relation 
between strong men, a mixture of genial autocracy, 
red republic, cross-currents, undercurrents, deep 
arguments, deeper silences, tact, pitched battles, 
real friendship, frank hostility. To describe a 
shearing shed as a place where they shear is 
the poorest description in the world. But the 
system inside the shed is so important to 
Australian wool — and to all who wear it, really 
though they have probably not the least idea 
of it — that at the risk of dullness it must be 
outlined. 

What has happened to the wool which you are 
wearing on your back, possibly a few months 
before you are wearing it, is this : — 

It was driven on the back of a sheep, in a 
march of short stages, to the woolshed. After 
half a day outside it scuffled up a wide gang- 
way into the back of the huge dark shed, and 
was there penned in a set of small yards, each 
the size of a bedroom. If the sheep were wet 
yesterday a shearer dives in and feels them 
under the brisket where the wool runs between 
the bare armpits and heavy rain soaks and 
lingers longest. If he calls them dry, the shed 
starts. 

Some say that in the scramble up to the shed the 



The "Cobbler" 193 

yolk and grease rise in the wool, and it is better 
for the sheep to cool a while in these first " sweat- 
ing pens" and let the yolk subside. Next door 
there is sometimes a line of smaller " forcing pens " 
for further subdividing the mob. There they wait 
till the last sheep in some " catching pen " is caught 
by one of the two shearers who work just outside 
of it. 

You let the other fellow catch the last sheep in the 
pen you share with him, if you can decently do so. 
Because shearers always pick the easiest sheep first. 
If one did not, his mate might. If there is an old 
ewe in the pen, a " rosella " as they call her, with 
most of the lower wool worn off", she goes the first. 
Consequently there is gradually left a bunch of 
fleeces with wrinkles stiffer than door mats. The 
stiffest, wrinkliest, is "the cobbler," because he 
sticks to the last. 

One hears yarns of a man's manoeuvres to let his 
mate get the cobbler. But there's an etiquette in 
shearing, and it is not the thing. Every shearer I 
saw worked straight ahead like a good mate ; 
stepped into the pen, took one quick look, dived at 
a sheep, caught him under the arms, bundled him 
out, and started. Notice what happens to the 
wool. 

The belly wool must be shorn first, cut ofi* ^ 
separately, and thrown on the floor. 

13 



194 ^^ ^^^ Wool Track 

The locks along the legs and extremities also 

^ fall of themselves separately on to the floor. 

y The rest comes off as one fleece. The shearer 

opens up the neck, clears the difficult wrinkles, 

clears one flank, and gradually works round and 

finishes on the other. For one second the fleece 

v' lies a soft shawl on the floor. A special boy 

immediately gathers it up carefully by the hips. 

If the sheep bleeds from a fair-sized cut the 
shearer calls "Tar.'' The tar-boy bolts off* for 
what looks like a pot of coffee-coloured paint — it 
used to be tar or kerosene and lamp-black or blue- 
stone, but is now mostly sheep-dip — and dabs it on 
the place to save it from the flies. 

Very occasionally the machine goes through a 
jugular or a knee-cap, or a leg is broken. With 
hand shears it was usually taken as a sign of 
reckless fast shearing. A whole flank can be laid 
open by one cut. Most squatters prefer fast shear- 
ing, but there has often been trouble with record- 
breakers, because they are apt to leave behind them 
a trail of badly wounded sheep. 

They invented in Australia a pretty machine, 
the size of a toy, which shore by itself, and only 
needed guiding. The first shed to use it was in 
the Far West. To-day, when nearly every shed in 
Australia has these machines, some of those great 
lonely central sheds are putting in another 



"Kinder Rough" 195 

Australian invention with a tiny electric motor 
above each machine. And in the cold of morning, 
as the shearers make towards the big building, it 
twinkles out here in the wilderness with exactly 
the same bright light as a London railway 
station. 

Most shearers told me the machines were a bit 
faster and easier than the " blades." There is less 
shoving, and they shear closer. " But they're just 
as rough on the sheep. If the expert (the man 
in the engine-room) hasn't ground the cutter quite 
right, she'll sail through the wrinkles. You needn't 
only get one cutter under the skin and the whole 
blanky machine slips through, and the first you 
know is the red. But it's the same as with any- 
thing else," added the philosopher. "One fellow 
will 'ave 'is sheep white, and the man next 'im 
will 'ave 'em all red — whether they're working 
tongs or machines .... and you can't alter 
that." 

A shearer who smothers a sheep or breaks a leg 
or cuts a jugular has strictly to buy the sheep. 
But if it is any way eatable the shearers' mess 
account usually takes it over. A machine often 
damages a man — slips from his hand, still cutting, 
and bares a shinbone like a flash. 

His wool off", the sheep is steered to the shoot. 
Sheep on principle always object to everything. 



196 On the Wool Track 

There's a struggle, and a short, decisive victory for 
the shearer. 

"Seems kinder rough, don't it, considerin' all 
we owe 'im ? " grins the victor. " But 'is troubles 
are over for the year." 
/ I Most sheep take five minutes to shear. Rams 
may take thirty, and count double. Shearers are 
t paid by the number they shear, and they might 
not object to catching sheep even after the whistle 
blows. But rouseabouts are paid by the week, and 
if the shearers caused them extra work they would 
hear of it. The sheep caught at the call of time 
is a " bell sheep." 

Averaging everything, from young wethers, 
which are hard, to old ewes, which are easy, a 
good man will shear about 90 or 100 sheep a 
day. The actual record is 327 sheep shorn by a 
Queensland shearer in nine hours. And other big 
records have been made. But that was probably 
years back with the " blades," when the fleeces were 
5 lbs. and 6 lbs., and not 9 lbs. and 10 lbs., as to-day. 
The station people count out each man's sheep. 
Their tallies for the day are put up on a board in 
the shed, and finally their tallies for the week. If 
the shearer mistrusts the count he often keeps a 
check on them from the wool-shed window. The 
man who shears most sheep is the "ringer." As 
he now gets 24s. for every hundred sheep, and his 



Simple Division 197 

weekly expenses are 4s. for the cook and about 
10s. for tucker, he is a well-to-do man. 

It is often a contractor who actually pays those 
wages. Instead of a squatter having the trouble 
to engage shearers and manage them, there are 
certain characters who will do the whole work for 
him, pay rouseabouts and all, for 5|d. or 6d. per 
sheep, which is £2, 7s. lid. to £2, 10s. a hundred. 
Some big Western stations which employed them 
for a time are now shearing for themselves again, 
in order to save the contractors' profit. 

Of late the shearers themselves have taken it 
into their heads to get those profits for themselves, 
and have started a co-operative contracting com- 
pany of their own, which divides the contractor's 
profit amongst the men. I heard the golden 
opinions of their work. It is perhaps the most 
hopeful development in the wool industry. 

The wool, you will remember, was in three 
places: odd locks from the legs scattered on the 
floor, the belly on the floor in one piece, the 
fleece picked up. Those three never come together 
again. That first simple classification follows right 
to the shop counter. 

The locks are always being swept up by special 
boys — " sweepers." The dirty, clotted, unpresentable 
scraps gradually fill a line of large clothes-baskets. 
They are much too precious to waste. The baskets 



198 On the Wool Track 

are pretty full by the "smoko," and are then 
shoved along the floor, emptied into a special bin, 
and known ever after as " locks " or " floor locks." 

The bellies are cleaner and more even. The 
sweepers tear out any stain and throw it apart, 
and pitch the rest of the bellies into special baskets, 
which are emptied into another special bin. Belly 
wool, being close to the ground during the year, 
is full of burrs. Wool from the forehead, which 
is matted and uneven, but clean, is sometimes kept 
separate also. 

The fleece — the most precious part of the clip, 
and the biggest — is not touched by the " sweepers " ; 
is not left on the floor at all. The " pickers up " 
race off* with it, spread it with one clever throw 
like a cloth over one of the tables at the end of the 
shed, and race back again. It lies on the table 
much like a bearskin hearthrug, the points — 
shoulders, neck, haunches — about hanging over the 
edge. These flanks have been brushing through 
the herbage during the year, and are full of burrs 
and uneven. The men at the table skirt them off, 
and throw the pieces on the floor. The fleece 
itself — once the back of the sheep, and so away 
from the herbage and burrs, and only containing a 
few grass seeds — they roll into a woolly round 
muff*, and put this, the pick of the wool, on the 
wool-classers' table. 



The Wool-Classer 199 

Now, the tables in the woolshed are not solid 
like dinner tables, but have tops like pavement 
gratings. Any little odd locks— second cut, and 
what not — that are not wanted in the fleece fall 
through the bars, and mount up like snow-flakes, 
in fair-sized heaps under the tables during the 
day. 

So that the fleece itself now lies in three more 
parts : odd locks and second cuts, under the tables ; 
on the floor, the pieces skirted off*; on the wool- 
classers' table, the rolled fleece itself. 

The locks from under the tables are swept up, 
and sometimes clubbed with the dirty old locks 
that fall on the floor around the shearer. But if 
there is enough of the " table locks " they are too 
clean to mix with the " floor locks," and go to a bin 
of their own. 

The rolled fleeces are piled before the wool- 
classer, the scientist, the expert in wool, in every 
shed. In a general way he has control of all the 
wool in it. That is to say, he generally makes a 
few excursions about the shed, amongst the bins, 
where the different classes of wool are mounting 
up, amongst the other tables; sometimes even 
amongst the shearers. If he sees bits of wrong 
wool straying into the right place he has a word 
to say. 

But his main work is to settle, here and now, at 



200 On the Wool Track 

his own table, what use will be made of the fleece. 
And his doing this well or badly has everything to 
do with the price. In this way: The long wool 
will be used for combing — only wool with a long 
staple can be. So those with a staple of about two 
inches he pitches into two bins behind him, marked 
"first combing," "second combing." His fingers 
run quickly through the wool, tug at a flock. If 
it is fine, clean, even in length, he pitches it into 
" first combing." If it is as long, but coarser and 
stronger, with more waste and unevenness, he 
tumbles it into "second combing." Shorter wool 
will be used, not for combing at all, but for clothing. 
It is pitched into two other bins — " first clothing," 
" second clothing." 

A bad fleece never gets amongst these combings 
and clothings at all. It comes along innocently 
enough. But he detects it like a Sherlock Holmes. 
One sheep was overlooked in the paddock, and not 
shorn last year. Here it is — dry, dark saffron. 
Another became poor — the wool breaks. Others 
came along matted or wasty. They are shot out at 
once, like the sparks in a foundry, into a bin 
labelled " cast fleece." 

Some squatters call their first and second comb- 
ings "Al and A," or "A and AA"; and their 
clothings "B and BB." Some make "superlines" 
of extra long fine wool. But most stick to these 



Wool Logic 20 1 

five broad classes, because a few big even lots sell 
better than a crowd of little ones. Of these classes 
it is not the first combing, usually, but the first 
clothing, that reaches the highest price per lb. 
Only, as a fleece of first combing is longer, there are 
more pounds in it to be paid for, and the sheep 
which carries it actually earns more. 

There are refinements in wool-classing. For 
example : Nearly half the weight of the fleece cut 
from most sheep is due to that grease in it from 
which they afterwards make lanoline. The skin 
of a shearer's hands is soft, almost like a woman's, 
because the grease actually manicures him. That 
yolk in some wool is egg-coloured. Now, the 
whole of this has to come out — to be scoured out 
with soap and water. And the weight of clean 
wool left afterwards is often less than half that of 
the greasy. 

Naturally, a man who buys wool wants to know 
how much of it will be useless. The wool-classer 
practically tells him. I met one who went so far as 
to classify his wool to himself as 38's or 45's or 54's, 
according as that number of lbs. of it would remain 
from every hundred lbs. scoured. This was quite 
apart from the ordinary division into 64's, 70's, 
and so on, which depends on the length of wool in 
a " top " of a certain weight. 

But that is talking riddles at this stage. What 



202 On the Wool Track 

matters here is that a man who buys greasy wool 
has to judge as best he can how much will be 
useful and how much useless. Consequently, if it 
is yellow and dirty, he is suspicious. It may 
mostly disappear, or the colour may never come 
out — anyway, he is not going to take the risk. 
He will count this unattractive colour as a mark 
against the wool. And so, if the wool is to be sold 
greasy, will the wool-classer. He is not going to 
have the price of his precious first clothing drop a 
penny a lb. (which seems a little, but is £1 per 
bale — perhaps £500 in one clip) just because a 
buyer happens to pitch on a dirty fleece amongst it 
So out goes the discoloured fleece into the " second 
clothing " bin. 

But runs in the real Australia, on the Darling 
and Warrego, where they have water, often scour 
their own wool. They not only earn the profits of 
scouring ; they save the freight which they would 
have to pay to carry perhaps 120 tons of grease 
from the real Australia to the sea — and that's 
a terrible long way. Now the buyer has not 
got to guess by its colour how that wool will 
scour, because he sees it already scoured. So, 
where a station scours its own wool, a wool-classer 
does not worry about how much it will reduce or 
about the red in it. The red of real Australia may 
be ugly, but he knows it will disappear. And the 



The Last Process 203 

amount of grease scoured from the wool will not 
affect what remains. 

It is this remorseless honesty with which 
Australian wool-classers draw distinctions against 
the wool of their own employers that makes it 
possible for an Englishman to ask year after year 
for the first clothing of a particular station to make 
billiard cloths. It was this that particularly struck 
the English commerce delegates who lately visited 
a Northern shed. 

There still remain the burry pieces which were 
skirted from the fleece at the wool-rolling tables 
and are lying on the floor. A boy, the " broomy," 
sweeps them to the piece-pickers, wool-classers in 
a small way, who divide it on their tables into first 
pieces, second pieces, and perhaps stained pieces. 

Lamb's wool, which is often only shorn to prevent 
corkscrew and other grass seeds working into the 
lamb, is scooped up all in one bunch between 
wooden clappers and taken to the classer, who 
classes it simply first, second, and third lambs. 
The wool of black sheep, good enough as far as it 
goes, is all clubbed into, perhaps, half a bale. 

Heaps looking like flock from torn mattresses 
are now lying in bins, with various labels. From 
any one bin they bundle it into a wool press, an 
arrangement in the safe-like bottom of which there 
waits an open wool bale. They fill the safe (and 



204 On the Wool Track 

so, o£ course, the bale) with wool; fill as much 
again into what looks like a pile-driver above, and 
then slowly, by levers, ram this double filling into 
the single bale below, and sew down the flap. 

The solid oblong sacking-covered brick that 
comes out is weighed, at about 3 cwts., and then 
branded, thus : 24, Kukuburra, 2nd combing, W.H. 
That is to say : — 

"This is the twenty-fourth bale pressed at 
Kukuburra station, filled with second combing 
shorn from wether hoggets." 



XVII 

WAGES 

Only the other day, when a Western shed finished 

shearing, the nearest town was pandemonium for 

a fortnight. To-day, if the shed cuts out at 4 p.m., 

most of the shearers are hull down on their 

bicycles, and the wool-classer on his way to 

Melbourne by 6 p.m. Some shearers will clear 

the town without a drink. Some may set aside a 

couple of sovereigns for a wet night. A few still 

get side-tracked, and lose their cheques in a 

country town. And that is one sign of a great 

difference which has grown between the shearers 

and station hands in the outside country. 

The shearer is a travelled man — often from 

New Zealand, nearly always from Sydney or 

Melbourne. He can look after himself in the 

town. The station hand too often cannot. He 

knows it. He has been there before, and within 

ten minutes of his getting there someone has 

touched him for his money. The real country 

man is as simple as a child. But the oldest hands 

205 



2o6 On the Wool Track 

in the world loaf about the country town, and 
they have noticed him come in. Consequently he 
is suspicious of all towns. 

It was said above that, besides the mining 
town, there were two sorts of towns in the real 
Australia. One exists on the wool industry. This 
chapter deals with the other sort. A big run 
out there will pay £10,000 to £15,000 a year in 
wages. The industry of the station townships 
is to make those wages. The industry of the 
other sort of town is to take them. More than 
half the wages may get away from them now- 
adays. In the old times they used to take them all. 

When you first see the white roofs of it under 
heavy, low clumps of pepper trees about five miles 
ofi* in the mirage on the red plain, there is not 
much difference between that town and the wool 
towns around the homesteads. There are about 
as many houses in one as in the other. The wool 
township is a trifle better kept. The other sort 
straggles wider. 

But the wool township is the terminus of its 
own road. The King's high road runs through 
the other sort. You find it made up of a few 
incidentals — a police station, a post-office, a school 
— which are there just because it is a town, and 
are fairly well built, because the Government 
builds them; three or four staggering bundles of 



No Reason for Hysterics 207 

rusty tin, which may be outhouses or the homes of 
old-age pensioners ; some goats, green nettles, scraps 
of iron, perhaps a sow or two ; one small general 
store to preserve them all from absolute destitu- 
tion. That is everything. There is no ghost of 
a sign of any shop or factory that can excuse a 
town for existing in the red desolation — except 
one big, well-kept, stoutly-built, prosperous centre 
of industry — or perhaps two or three — around 
which it has obviously grown up. That is the 
hotel. 

In the real Australia there is very little round 
metal coin, because there is very little use for it. 
Ink and paper are more convenient. The odds 
and ends a man buys at the station store are 
mostly debited to his account. The balance of 
his wages he carries away in a cheque. The first 
place he reaches is a town with one industry — to 
take that cheque. As with other industrial towns, 
the sole reason that governed the situation of it 
in one square of the map rather than in another 
was the convenience of that place for its industry. 
Geography books should explain this. It makes 
the map of Central Australia more intelligible. 

There is no call for hysterics. These things 
are the same to-day as yesterday. There is 
nothing unusual to look on at, and nothing 
difficult to understand. After fifty weeks' un- 



2o8 On the Wool Track 

relieved monotony of a ten-mile paddock a man 
needs a few crowded civilised hours by way of 
contrast. The nearest substitute a country town 
offers is a fortnight's blindness to its surrounding 
desolation. If there were to grow up a population 
of born real Australians they might have nerves 
for that monotony. But real Australians are 
not born. 

The station people in the West include a good 
proportion of those magnificent artisans who 
would never be there if they could keep their 
work in the cities; a scattering of the world's 
wastrels, and a large portion of Australians who 
have come out West, worked for a year in the 
wilderness, and now, like most Australians, want 
to work somewhere else. They receive their 
cheque and start off. At the boundary of the 
run, thirty miles from anywhere, they find the 
first lonely hotel. At the next place, twenty 
miles on, is a city consisting of three hotels, 
where there is two days to wait for the coach; 
last of all is the railway town. To a good few 
the journey is a hurdle race. They go back for 
six months and try again. There are men at this 
hour out-back who have been trying to get to 
Sydney for five years, and are still trying. 

Drink is not a vice in real Australia; it is an 
episode. Attacks are spoken of as if they were 



An Episode 209 

influenza or measles. A man who drinks is not a 
bad man. If one thinks he is it is better to stay 
at home. One will never understand the Far 
West. 

For it is best to face the fact which anyone's 
eyes must tell him. And the fact is that a pitiably 
large fraction of these large-hearted, intelligent, 
simple men of the Far West — the best material in 
Australia, the truest mates in the world, men 
who reverence any straight woman who lives 
amongst them as something more than sacred, 
men, all of whom with the earnings of a few 
years could buy their own homes in good country, 
and literally make Australia — spend in certain 
regularly recurring fortnights the whole profits 
of the years between. The whole good that life- 
times of great work amongst the mirages and 
mysteries of real Australia does for a considerable 
part of its population is to earn for the hotel- 
keeper quick profits, and for the workers one 
feverish fortnight per annum in some desolate 
village, where it would be a misery to lie dead. 

Occasionally men are quite frank with them- 
selves. We heard of one greybeard, who was 
starting on his periodical campaign, when a 
lady in the town offered to give him some work. 

"No, thank you," he said. "Yer can't do two 

things at once — not properly." 

14 



2IO On the Wool Track 

But as a rule they start off into town with a 
thorough conviction that the latest occasion was 
the last and that they will never touch it again. 
There are very few stations without some old 
hand who tells the boss, as part of the formula, 
when he takes his cheque that he has given it 
best. He might as well say he had grown wings. 
One manager told us of a man who was droving 
with him and who had been for years out in that 
monotony. They were to camp near a town. A 
couple of miles before reaching it the man was 
swaying and talking thickly like a drunken man. 
He had not had a drop. 

We met in the Riverina one man — whilst he 
lived, the hardest, most honest workman I ever 
saw — whom his manager would not allow if he 
could help it to possess a horse. It was some 
twenty miles into town, and it would mean a trip 
there every week — instead of a trip once a year — 
until the horse was sold, as would be sure to 
happen sooner or later. But it was a constant 
matter of manoeuvring to prevent Isaac getting 
that horse. He would see a likely pony of the 
boss's, one that didn't look too expensive, and he'd 
want to buy him straight away. 

"I tink I'd like to be buying t'at pony, Mr 
Macrae," he would suggest. The boss knew 
what was up. 



The Formula 211 

"Very well, Isaac. I'll want £20 for him," he 
answered promptly. 

"No, no. I'd want a horse if I gave £20 for 
him." 

So Isaac mopped his forehead, and ruefully gave 
up his hopes of getting to town that week. A 
few days later he came back. 

" Mr Macrae," he said. 

" Yes, Isaac." 

"I think I must be gettin' some shirts," said 
Isaac, fingering his shirt-sleeves. "Dese shirts I 
got from Connor s last time, they're getting very 
old." 

" Very well," answered the boss cheerfully. 
" What's your size ? I'll ring up Connor and get 
him to send 'em out." 

"Oh, he's not got 'em, not de right ones," said 
Isaac hastily. Then he looked up sorrowfully like 
an offended child. " I don't want it for what you 
tink," he said. 

" What do you think I think ? " 

"I don't want it for what you tink — no," 
repeated the offended Isaac. He would not say 
any more. 

Every time that Isaac went into town for his 
spell he had given it best. And every time, after 
about a fortnight, when he was getting pretty well 
due to return, he had to be shepherded home again. 



212 On the Wool Track 

Generally it was done through the kindly police. 
They locked him up in a friendly sort of way so 
as to give him the chance of sobering down. 
Perhaps it frightened him a little too. Usually he 
was feeling the week's effects when he returned. 

" Oh dear/' he would say, " I'm very bad." 

" How are you feeling, Isaac ? " asked the boss 
next morning. 

" Better, tank you." 

" Did you see 'em last night ? " 

" A little," was the innocent answer. 

It is an unpardonable offence for a man to get 
drunk when he is in town in charge of stock or 
horses so that harm may happen to them. But it 
is sometimes worth while overlooking it in the 
case of a man like Isaac. For he was a real 
sportsman even at the worst of times. He lost a 
watch in town. The police found out who had 
stolen it, and locked Isaac up to get sober and give 
evidence. But he wouldn't prosecute. To every 
question they asked him he just shook his head 
and said: "I won't go back on my mates." He 
lost his watch by doing so. But the idea shaped 
itself in his head that he had been dealing with 
this man as a mate, and whatever the man might 
have done he would not give evidence against him. 

As a matter of fact the mates that are picked up 
in country towns are often waiting there to be 



A Gentleman 213 

picked up. When a station hand comes in with a 
cheque they are round him like flies. Two or three 
of them have seen him drive in from their lounge 
at the verandah posts at various corners. We 
struck one case in which an English groom leaving 
a station with a cheque was "touched" for his 
money three times before he had been in town half 
an hour. Fortunately his boss — a boy of about 
nineteen in this case — had taken his cheque away 
from him ten minutes before they drove in, 
somewhat to his amazement. By the time the 
boss handed the cheque back to him that evening 
on the railway station he had learned why. The 
floating population which props up the verandah 
posts in country towns is as nearly the antithesis 
of the strong, simple men who live on the stations 
outside as it would be possible to find. 

They have an almost romantic reverence for any 
straight woman that lives amongst them in the 
West. Some time ago on a Victorian station one 
of the employees left ; a few days later five other 
hands suddenly left also, and followed him. They 
traced him to Melbourne, and they found when 
they got there that he had shipped on a steamer 
for South Africa. Then they returned to their 
station again. If they had caught the man it is a 
matter of conjecture what they would have done 
with him. 



214 On the Wool Track 

The failing of many Western station hands is 
not by any means wholly their own fault. It is a 
question how much of the fault in these days lies 
with those who cater for them. 

The publican is not an ogre. He is mostly a 
generous, good fellow, always pleasant to spend an 
evening with ; often the soberest man in the place. 
His moral code, which is inherited or bought with 
the house, may be queer. But whose is not ? " If 
we don't get their cheques here," he says, " the next 
place will." And there may be some men who do 
not consider it an unfortunate incident if a man 
comes in with a likely cheque and gets away with 
it. By what one heard, most big hotels now scorn 
to sell drugged liquor, and many small hotels 
do not. 

One squatter told us of how he and two of his 
men drove a mob of sheep into a country siding to 
truck them. At the end of a long hot dusty 
afternoon they reached the railway. Opposite the 
siding was a hotel. He shouted the men a drink. 
The men asked for whisky. He himself inquired 
if thoy kept anything soft and harmless. 

" Ginger beer," said the man at the bar. 

So he had his " ginger beer " and the men had 
their whiskies, and they walked from the bar. 
The boss had not walked twenty yards before he 
leant against the fence and was sick. The men, 



^^ Lambing Down " 215 

unfortunately, had stomachs too case-hardened for 
that. They were drunk. One of them was stupid 
for two days. 

When sheep are lambing men are sent into the 
paddocks to see that everything goes smoothly. 
The process is called '' lambing down." By a gentle 
metaphor the words have been transferred to the 
assistance which in the old days it was customary 
for publicans to give to men who came in to get 
rid of a cheque. The man handed the cheque over 
the bar. Sometimes he asked to work it out. At 
other times he expected to receive back the change 
when he had finished. He lost consciousness a 
little later ; when he came to himself he was in a 
room with empty champagne bottles all round him. 
He was told he had been enjoying the time of his 
life in the interval and shouting champagne for 
half the town — which may have been true, some- 
times; anyway, there was none of th^ cheque 
left. The patient was allowed to stay for a few 
days to get his wits and his digestion more or 
less fit to face the world again ; and then sent 
off with some rations and a swag for which he 
was often pathetically grateful, to find work for 
another year. 

" Lambing down " does not happen as it used to ; 
but it is by no means vanished yet. The publican 
has his philosophy — explained above. " I'm licensed 



2i6 On the Wool Track 

to sell grog," as one of them explained to a startled 
Sydney man, " and, by G , I'm going to." 

We came across one extraordinary case, which 
gave one a paradox to puzzle a philosopher — a case 
of a scrupulously conscientious South Australian 
publican who let his guest work out the strictly 
full value of his cheque by allowing him one drink 
per hour until it was exhausted. The guest in 
question was an old boundary -rider. He came in 
once a year, lay down on a bench in the parlour, 
and then the contract was punctiliously fulfilled. 
The visitor was in a mazy condition, never once 
drunk, and never once sober, for about a month. 
Whether conscientious publicans are an improve- 
ment on the other sort may be a question. 

They notice nowadays, even in the Far West, that 
the new generation of Australians manages to keep 
its cheque in the country towns, reach Sydney or 
Melbourne, and lose it there. That is a step in 
advance. 

But, soberly speaking, though it is understand- 
able and nothing to scream about, though the men 
who live by it all are no better and no worse than 
other people, the man who goes into the middle of 
Australia to understand it, and who realises what 
an immense amount of brave, monotonous, hard 
work is carried through year by year for no other 
result whatever to a fair fraction of the population 



But a Pitiful Waste 217 

than a few days' periodic fever — a man who realises 
that this pitiful waste of effort, this leak in the 
nation's energy, is almost part of the system, and 
who yet comes back thoroughly satisfied that 
everything is quite as it ought to be, is either 
wilfully or stupidly dense. 



XVIII 

TRAVELLERS ALL— FOOTMAN AND 
BAGMAN 

Now what was said in the last chapter does not 

apply to the station hands on " inside " runs. But 

in the " outside " one cannot help thinking, in 

spite of all that is sometimes told of him, that 

the shearer is, taken all round, the highest type 

of worker. We could see with our eyes, and 

everyone agreed, that he got away with his 

cheque far more often than the rest. There is 

still a sprinkling of flash, raw shearers left in 

the Far West, because the wastrels of Europe — 

scholars amongst them, and sometimes, they say, 

even priests — drift there, and so do others who 

do not like to live too near to the police. But 

except for that strange jetsam, which circulates 

slowly about the West and seldom comes " inside " 

at all, the class of shearers has been changing 

this last twenty years, and the change is pretty 

well complete. 

218 



The Footman 219 

It is hard to lay down the law about a profession 
which includes good, bad, poor, well-to-do city men, 
country men, men from all the States and divisions 
of Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, and even 
Yankees. 

There jump into your railway carriage at one 
forgotten bush siding a man dressed like a farmer, 
another dressed like a stockman, another like a 
solicitor's clerk, another like a Botany factory hand, 
a fifth in check tweeds and a green hat, as if he 
were going to golf. They are all shearers. You 
can see from the window a man with a billy and a 
swag starting off on foot along the red road. He is 
a shearer too. 

It is enough to see a dusty figure carrying its 
swag along the road beside the railway line for 
superior city persons from the window to class 
him mentally : " Genus — tramp ; species — some- 
thing of the sort that pokes its head over suburban 
back fences; sundowner, swaggie, unemployed.'' 
There is no such thing in the West. The long 
stage from tank to tank — thirty miles if it is an 
inch, hot sun and red dust from seven at morning 
to seven at night, with nothing but the thought 
of the free night breeze from the plains, a 
cup of billy tea with a mate, and a very sweet 
smoke, when it is all over, to comfort him — 
does not offer any great allurement to a " tramp." 



220 On the Wool Track 

It is quite a different man that was passed 
just now along the rail side. That man was a 
" footman." 

There is some evasive social distinction between 
the footman and the cyclist. It is one of the most 
puzzling things in the West, that distinction. 
Because it cuts utterly against the whole grain of 
the West to recognise any social distinction at all, 
except, perhaps, that between a good man and a 
useless one. It no more enters the head of the 
stockman that he is the social inferior of the man 
he serves and obeys than it would strike the 
captain that he was the social inferior of his 
colonel. 

But all through the West there is a distinction 
drawn between the man who goes on foot and the 
man who rides. It is an almost imperceptible 
distinction ; and some people will tell you that 
it is just a joke; and it is true they do pass 
it over with a laugh. They are all mates, after 
all. They are all " travellers." When a man says 
he met a "traveller" or a "bagman" in the 
bush he does not mean a commercial traveller. 
He means a man making his way from station 
to station, probably a man on horseback with 
his kit in his bag. They are all travellers; and 
there is no call to hurt a man's feelings just 
because he has to go on foot. But the dis- 



"They were Horrible" 221 

tinction is more than a joke. If you wet a 
mental finger and rub it on your mental cheek 
you can just catch the faint breath of feeling 
which makes a footman always explain how he 
came to sell his bike. " No, I'm footing it. I got 
rid of my sulky in Wanaaring." " I never carried 
a swag in my life," explained a mate of mine on a 
long trip, ^'exceptin' only once, an' then I didn't 
'ave to." It is precisely the feeling which 
makes an English schoolboy explain how it was 
his father became a poor man. It is surprising in 
the bush. 

What the shearer in the West used to be we 
learned from a man who has probably seen 
more of the Darling and its history than any 
man living. This was Captain Pickhill, who 
was on the first steamer that ever sailed up 
the river, and lives by the river still. He 
was certainly not over-prejudiced towards the 
squatters, and this is what he told us of the 
old-time shearers : 

"Lots of those shepherds and shearers near 
Bourke," he said, "were 'old hands.' Some of 
them were decent good fellows; and the rest — 
well, they were horrible ! Unmitigated rascals, 
fearing neither God nor the devil. The lan- 
guage I have heard in Bourke made a man 
wonder the heavens did not drop down and 



222 On the Wool Track 

crush him. They were great, coarse, horrible 
brutes of men. 

" I remember I tied the steamer up to the bank 
near Netallie, many years ago, and sent the boy 
seven miles across country to the homestead to get 
some meat. He had to bring the carcase back 
with him on the horse; so you see it was a bit 
of a job. 

" I had turned in for a doze when I heard a burly 
voice on the bank. Some hulking great shearer 
wanted to come on board. 

" My wife was on the deck. Presently I heard 
his big feet on the plank. 

" ' Where's the cuss ? ' he asked. That was me. 

" ' He's in his room,' says my wife. 

" ' Could I see him ? ' 

" * I don't know,' she answered, ' he may be asleep. 
He's not very well.' 

" ' Go up and wake him,' he says. 

" Well, I got up and went down. ' What do you 
want ? ' I asked. 

" ' Can you give me some tea and sugar and a bit 
of flour ? ' 

" ' Yes,' I said ; ' where are your ration bags ? ' 

"He handed them out. I gave him tea, sugar, 
and flour enough to carry him along to the next 
station. 

" ' I haven't got a smoke,' he says. 



"What, no Meat?" 223 

" I handed him a stick of it. 

"He says: 'Couldn't you give us a bit of 
meat *? ' 

" ' Every sheep we get here/ I said, ' we have to 
bring seven miles on the saddle from Netallie ; and 
that is all the meat we have till Saturday, hanging 
up there/ (It was Friday and there were about 
2 lbs. of mutton.) ' No,' I said, ' we can't let you 
have it/ 

"'Surely you won't begrudge a man a bit of 
meat ? ' he grumbled. 

"I stepped between him and the plank. 'You 
lazy, long-nose scoundrel,' I said, facing him, 
' you empty that sugar out on deck . . . and 
now the tea . . . and the flour I have given 
you.' 

"He did. 

" ' Now,' I said, ' clear out over this plank as soon 
as your boots will let you.' 

" That was fifteen years ago, and it was the last 
I saw of him." 

The huts — the sleeping accommodation — which 
most of the squatters provided for the shearers in 
those days were sometimes hardly fit to ask even 
that sort of being to camp in. The faults were by no 
means all on one side. Since the law was passed to 
put an end to this, the shearers' huts have been 
made wholesome and, on the whole, comfortable 



224 ^^ the Wool Track 

barracks, such lodging as any decent man would 
ask for. 

There do exist flash, raw shearers still. We only 
met one, who talked long and loud of his quarrels 
with the police, until an innocent-looking boy next 
door to him asked sweetly if he had been taken up 
for refusing to fight, when he became suddenly 
subdued. And of course many youngsters come 
back with full purses, roaring like lions, who went 
up-country like lambs. But many are employers 
themselves— farmers or farmers' sons shearing in 
their slack season. I heard conversations on every 
topic better worth listening to than you would 
hear in the lobby of Parliament. Here are scraps 
from a railway carriage. " I wouldn't put the tax 
on this Western land, perhaps ; anyway, not till it's 
suitable for settlement. The river is bound to be 
dammed and the country irrigated, and then it will 
be different." " What did I think of New Zealand ? 
Well, some day the mail-boat will start off an' she 
will not find New Zealand." "I picked it up 
because it was a good Australian yarn, but the 
writing's nothing much." The conversation in 
the hut after tea ranges from shearing to the 
House of Lords. It covers slow sheds and 
fast sheds, ringers and records, racing, farming; 
but more especially politics. Some M.P.'s have 
much less political philosophy in them than 



A German's Evidence 225 

the Australian shearer. Elections have been 
won and lost, candidates put up and knocked 
down, in those sheds. They have sent one of 
themselves to Parliament before now — to be the 
ablest man there. 

Shearers are more consistent with their political 
principles than is often admitted. They will 
not have a Chinaman or an Indian or an American 
negro amongst them; but they will work with 
a Maori or an Australian black-fellow. That is 
simply because they do not think the former 
should be allowed here; but they recognise a 
duty to the latter. They have libraries in the 
huts, and a committee of their own generally 
arranges for all sorts of newspapers. They always 
subscribe a part of their earnings to the local 
hospital. 

A learned German, Dr Robert Schachner, lately 

took the very enterprising step of peeling off his 

coat and going to live amongst shearers, miners, 

and factory hands in Australia in order to see 

what the condition of each was. He found the 

shearers in their standard of life, their reading 

and intelligence generally, the first of the three 

— and the factory hand far the lowest. ''If . . . 

the spicy air of the bush gives the shearer new 

life and energy for thought and reading," he 

wrote afterwards, "it is far different in the 

15 



2 26 On the Wool Track 

factory. . . . Scarcely fit to leave school, the boy 
enters the horrid gloom of the machine rooms . . . 
from the very beginning he has no knowledge 
of the part he plays in the general work; the 
more perfect he grows in that part the narrower 
becomes his field of activity, till finally he wastes 
day after day, year after year, in the repetition 
of a single mechanical trick. What wonder if 
his brain dries up . . . ? " It is rather strange 
that the remedy he proposes is a higher tariff — 
which would presumably produce still more 
factory folk — not more shearers. But at least 
he considers the shearer a valuable man. 

In fact, in spite of all that is sometimes 
said of him, the shearer is, take him for all 
in all, a surprisingly high class of workman. 
Often the only sign that tells you he is a 
shearer at all is the scar made by binde-i or 
some other burr in the fleece on the back of 
his hand. He is most capable of looking after 
himself these days. A few sharpers with a 
slight knowledge of shearing often get into a 
big shed, and get a "school" going — a nightly 
gamble. They are regularly called "forties" — 
the forty thieves — and they sometimes make a 
pile out of young shearers. 

But as a whole, shearers, unlike station hands, 
spend their money deliberately. I met one who 



i 



How they Spend 227 

lived all last year in Sydney on £70, and another 
who spent £90 in four days at Randwick.^ But 
then he meant to. Between him and the station 
hand who left £75 in a country hotel, there is all 
the difference between a country man and a 
city one. 

1 Kandwick is the site of tlie big race- course at Sydney. 



XIX 

PORTS AND FLEETS OF THE DARLING 

•'Do you catch anything — can you see something 
white in the trees there ? " asked the skipper a 
little anxiously. 

It was on the Darling River, at a point about 
180 miles from Bourke, by the river, or 60 miles 
by land — for the river runs about three to one. 
The nearest city of any real size was Broken Hill, 
and that was nearly 220 miles away, and 
Broken Hill itself, when you get there, is a town 
in a desert — a freak, a modern city surrounded by 
a basin as bare as the palm of your hand, and in 
its colour not unlike it to look at. That was the 
nearest big town. Stations not very far away, 
when the Darling runs too dry to float a steamer, 
send their wool to Broken Hill. 

So this was a pretty lonely sort of a spot. 
The Darling runs between high banks, as steep 
as the banks of a railway cutting, and in dry 
times with about as much grass on them. And, 

228 



Uninteresting ? 229 

the river being low, the view of the scenery from 
a Darling steamer is much the same as that from 
a train in a railway cutting. 

Many people say that, therefore, the trip down 
the river by steamer is uninteresting. So it 
is if a man sleeps all the time. Because then, 
naturally, he is not aware of it when the ashen- 
grey river banks of modern alluvial soil rise 
suddenly, and grow red, and you realise that you 
are running now between river walls made of the 
ancient red soil that once made the hills and 
valleys of this continent. The grains of the red 
bank that swims past you there were probably — 
aeons and SBons before — the cool red sand to which 
the olive light just filtered down through fathom 
on fathom of ocean. Creepy dark things crawled 
over them, and the deep sea-currents furrowed 
them. There's not very much of the red soil left 
along the Upper Darling. But still there it is, 
rising so clearly from the grey that you could 
probably put one foot on the modern soil and 
one on the old. Most of the river homesteads 
are built upon the red, because, of course, it is 
the land above flood-mark. What is lower than 
the floods has been covered with grey alluvium, 
which has been brought by water from the 
Queensland hills and which the water still trans- 
forms after rain into a sort of sticky black glue, 



230 On the Wool Track 

which the lightest tyred wheels pick up until 
they actually clog against the side. The red soil 
is the relic of the old soil which is still underneath 
the black soil. It is that same fertile red sand 
that covers the fences in the real Australia, and 
it grows all fruits well and wheat excellently. 
The Mildura fruit farms are built on it, and when 
the Darling comes to be dammed the irrigation 
settlements will probably be made on the patches 
of red soil. 

If a man sleeps all day he misses the extra- 
ordinary hill which suddenly peeps down at him 
over the tree-tops at Gundabooka. Its flat top 
possibly marks the actual old surface of that 
sandy ocean bed, which has been worn away all 
round. He misses the curious ridges of rock — 
all of that same ancient Australia — which every 
ten miles or so crop suddenly out of the grey bank 
on one side, straggle obliquely like some old 
dragon across the water, and disappear into the 
grey banks the other side. 

Those rocks entirely bar the river when it is 
low. As it rises and they begin to be covered, 
they will still wreck a steamer. And yet when 
our steamer, the Jandra, was drawing 4 feet of 
water and there was only 6 feet in the tortuous 
channel through these rocks, and jagged boulders 
hidden a foot below the water on either side, we 



His South Head Light 231 

stood beside the skipper and watched him drive 
the steamer close under one bank and then shoot 
suddenly across to the other and back, following a 
channel of which not a trace could we see. But he 
knew it by certain ugly oily disturbances here 
and there in the smooth water. Once, when the 
river opened — for no apparent cause, but really 
because of the current swirling round a hidden 
ridge, with an isolated monster called " Big Ben " 
somewhere under the surface — into a circular 
basin, the skipper stopped the ship dead, put a 
line ashore, and warped her slowly around the 
basin close under one bank, as carefully as a 
battleship is warped into dock. There was not 
a sign on the surface to show that you could not 
have thrashed the Dreadnought fair down mid- 
stream. But the skipper could read the signs of 
his navigation. Other skippers watch the clouds, 
or the season, or the sunset; this skipper knew 
by some mark to which the water had risen on 
some particular snag or rock miles back that there 
was not enough water for him over the " Yanda " 
rocks. 

But at the particular point with which this 
chapter opens the river did not look interesting. 
It was a railway cutting unrelieved by rocks or 
red soil, or even ducks or pelicans. Only grey 
bank on one side, grey bank on the other, tops of 



2 32 On the Wool Track 

occasional trees looking over them, and a strip 
of sky and water between. But the skipper was 
searching for something. 

Now, the folk on ships sailing from Chili across 
the Pacific begin after many days to look anxiously 
for some sign very, very far away on the horizon 
ahead — a point or two on the bow, it may be. 
And there turns up at last, perhaps in the early 
morning, exactly where and when they are looking 
for it, an intermittent white flush like the very 
faintest far-off reflection of a lightning flash. 
That sign, they know, marks the port of Sydney ; 
and they make for it, and presently lift up a 
pin point, which is the South Head light. 

This skipper, too, was looking for something. 

" Do you catch anything in the trees there ? " 
he said. 

Then we too looked anxiously as tree-top after 
tree-top wandered past. We could see nothing 
to cause excitement. 

" Ah, there it is ! " 

The skipper s face had illuminated. 

We looked ; what was there ? 

" That sheepskin,'' he said, " on the lower bough. 
M'Clochertie said he'd put it there to show where 
we were to land his groceries." 

So here was the sign of a port of call on the 
Darling. The river is, roughly, 2000 miles long, 



The Big "T" 233 

and looks much the same from end to end. And 
the captains have to look for— a sheepskin on a 
lower bough. 

That evening we passed another sign. We 
found over our starboard bow an ancient piece 
of board — the skipper said it had once been a 
notice board — nailed across two posts. Beside it 
was a tree. On the tree was a scar, very old and 
deep. It was the letter T. 

^^ That's Toorale," said the skipper. "It's eight 
miles back from that tree, on the Warrego. There's 
hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of wool 
been taken from just here. You can see the mark 
of it — there." 

Down the bank ran a smooth, shallow groove 
worn in the dry, grey soil by the slipping of 
thousands of bales. That solitary T is the only 
mark of a great Darling River port. In some 
years its trade must have been not far short of 
£30,000. There are sea-ports living on less than 
that. 

We did not stop at Toorale. Another ship 
regularly does the trade of that port. We were 
making for another sign. After panting down 
river another day, dropping groceries and beer- 
casks at the port of Louth, taking on fuel by the 
simple process of tying up, chopping it, and then 
rolling it down the bank, at last, about nightfall, 



234 ^^ the Wool Track 

when the sky ahead was peeping in yellow slashes 
through the trees and shining very softly on the 
dark river below, we turned into a long reach. 
We had been driving small batches of ducks ahead 
of us all the afternoon. The crew and the deck 
passenger were lying in the bows potting at them 
with a pea-rifle. The captain would not let them 
shoot pelicans, and the big deck-hand would not 
let them shoot wood-duck on the bank, because 
they could not pick them up. So, except for the 
hawks in the trees, the ducks swimming ahead of 
us had received the crew's undivided attentions, 
and were growing pretty shy of them. Mile 
after mile they kept ahead in short flights, never 
leaving the ribbon of river, never letting the 
steamer get close enough to be dangerous. The 
assistant deck-hand had just taken the rifle from 
the fireman for a sporting shot, when the duck, 
of course, rose. Only this time, instead of flying 
on for a hundred yards and then swimming 
again, they circled wildly to the left, high over 
the bank, and flashed off" like lightning through 
the trees. 

It was another sign to navigators. 

"That's how I can always tell when the other 
steamer's coming," he said — "by the duck flying 
back on us so ; or sometimes the other boat's 
waves coming up the river ahead of her. And it's 



^ 



The Port 235 

the same when we get near a town. The birds 
won't pass it — they fly back out of the way/' 

It looked a countrified enough reach in all 
conscience. We had just passed a sight one had 
never before seen in Australia — some blue flower, 
possibly blue-bell, growing as thick between the 
trees as hyacinths in an English wood, literally a 
bright-blue carpet of them. We had seen white 
flowers — both daisy and some sort of peppermint 
— which you could smell for half a mile, growing 
the same way, during the last day or two ; and a 
day or so later one found square miles of Dunlop 
actually carpeted with not only white and blue, 
but yellow also — one of those extraordinary results 
which a few days' rain brings from sheer desert in 
Central Australia. This reach was, if anything, 
further from the world than the sheep-skin port. 
There did not seem anything to frighten even a 
duck. 

But presently over the edge of the bank there 
sailed by the grey roof of a shed. A man passed 
on the bank carrying a bucket. It was the sign 
of one of the busiest factories in Australia. 

From that day to this day on which I write, 
nearly two months later, the steamer Jandra has 
done nothing except to make weekly trips to that 
quiet reach and back to Bourke, getting away as 
fast as ever she can load with the cargo from that 



236 On the Wool Track 

factory. I happened to be watching the eight-hours' 
processions of the trades unions in Sydney. On 
the last wagon, the carters', there came sailing 
along 66 bales of dumped wool with the brand 
Dunlop. That had been part of the Jandra*s 
cargo. 

They do not call these ports " wool factories " — 
probably because they are out in the fresh country 
air, where all factories ought to be. But a man 
who hears the huge shearing-shed buzzing with 
machinery on one side, and the wool-scour pump 
coughing on the other as it sucks yellow Darling 
soup far up into the troughs in another big shed, 
and sees the wool fed into the troughs, clawed, 
clutched, soaped, shaken on iron teeth, finally fed 
out again and spread on the wool green to be dried 
under the sun into a dazzling dead white; who 
sees it carried into the pressing and dumping shed 
and pressed into half its size and then dumped with 
hoop-iron bands into nearly half its size again, and 
finally carted off to a fourth big shed to wait for 
the boat — a city man who sees and hears all that 
for the first time cannot help realising that, what- 
ever it may be in name, it is a factory indeed. There 
are the usual factory regulations. For instance, 
the water from the wool-scour must not be returned 
to the river, so it is pumped out, at Dunlop, to 
irrigate South African Rhodes grass on the plain. 



Sailing across Australia 237 

People hardly realise that, all the while the 
railways are fetching their loads and emptying 
them into Sydney, there runs out beyond them 
all another stream of traffic in quite a different 
direction — up and down, past these wool factories, 
along one of the largest waterways in the world. 
It trickles slowly and fitfully at right angles to 
the railways for about 2000 miles — practically 
from Queensland to the Bight. Up and down the 
centre of Australia there streams — even at this 
day — a quite considerable shipping. For all we 
hear of it on the sea-coast it might not exist. If 
Parliament could be transported just for one day, 
and dumped on the black and white wharves thirty 
or forty feet high, that tower stage on stage above 
the little steamers at Bourke; if the members 
could stand on the edge, by the row of steam-jib 
cranes, and watch Mildura fruits and Japanese 
onions lowered ever so far down into the little 
holds below — then the prospects of the Darling 
people might be different. There are inland ports 
away there at Bourke and Wilcannia which have 
still a river trade worth considering. It is true 
the railways to Walgett, Brewarrina, CunnamuUa, 
and Broken Hill have cut off great chunks of their 
hinterland. Before Brewarrina and Walgett lines 
were built, 22,058 bales in a year came down the 
river to Bourke, and 4523 up river. Other towns 



238 On the Wool Track 

have taken the whole of that trade from above. 
But last year Bourke still got 3000 bales by river 
from below. There is enough trade left to keep 
two or three Bourke steamers plying for all they 
are worth whenever the river is up, and occasionally 
to draw up one from the big fleets trading on the 
river below. 

You do not realise until you get nearly 500 
miles from Sydney that this long river is the chief 
public possession of the people living over about 
one-half of New South Wales. The minds of 
people on the coast are full of railways and roads, 
Newcastle coal, Sydney Harbour. People in the 
Far West have one interest far above others — their 
river. 

It is the one great public possession in that half 
of the State ; and yet they hardly possess it. The 
people who possess it are the majority in Parlia- 
ment, who come from Sydney and the coast, and 
who think a great deal of Sydney and the railways 
leading to it, and do not know or care tuppence 
about the river. 

Of course if Captain Cook had been given a 
map of Australia before he discovered it, he would 
have spotted at once a great basin and waterway, 
and would have marked it off" as a State by itself 
— because its people would obviously have one big 
possession in common, and would want to combine 



Captain Cook had no Map 239 

to use it and improve it with their own money in 
their own way. In that case the Darling would 
have been carefully nursed, locked, its flood-water 
stored. And instead of the Sydney railways 
stopping short of it in the deadly fear that it 
might be of some use in carrying the produce of 
its own country away cheaply to its own mouth, 
there would have been a whole system of little 
railways running down to it on either side to feed 
it, much as the small bones run into a fish's 
backbone. 

But Captain Cook was not given a plan. The 
Darling, when it was found, was tacked loosely on 
to Sydney. Sydney has pulled a snag or two out 
of it. The head streams have been dammed, and 
the flood-water does not reach the Darling as it 
used to. When it does, with the exception of 
what is caught by an ill-planned but still useful 
weir at Bourke, it runs into the ocean exactly as 
if white men had never come to Australia to stop 
it. So there are no fruit or vegetables or grain 
worth considering grown along the Darling. The 
water has to be lifted thirty or forty feet to 
irrigate them, and it takes a capitalist to do that. 
The fruits often come from Mildura and the 
chaff* from Adelaide. Both are near the river ; and 
the goods come over water. But it is generally 
ocean water. The river water is not there. 



240 On the Wool Track 

If there is but a chance of a river, the whole 
country rushes to it. Two years ago wool teams 
came from the Paroo to Wilcannia on the chance 
that the river was up. They hurried day after day 
down the plain, mostly along the part which people 
who draw maps have marked as the bed of the 
Paroo River. Geographers have the grace to 
draw a dotted line for the bed of the Paroo River. 
It is a Central Australian river, and you can best 
find the bed of it with a spirit level. The wool 
teams had come down it and out on to the red 
country; and at last through the red and white 
sand-hill into Wilcannia. 

When they got to Wilcannia they found the 
river a thin tawny streak between two dry walls 
of grey mud as dead as an ash-heap. The river, 
which was expected to rise . . . had not risen. 
Some rain may have fallen in Queensland and 
started off for the plains. But it was taken up by 
dam after dam across the head streams and fairly 
withered and scorched up by a thousand miles or so 
of sun and an atmosphere drier than a stale sponge- 
cake. Anyway, it expired long before it got near 
to Wilcannia. 

So the teams turned round and went 120 miles 
to Broken Hill to the railway. That is what the 
river means to about half of New South Wales. 

For one half of New South Wales there is one 



The Only Way 241 



thing to be done. It is bound to be done, because 
it is the one apparent thing that can be done. If it 
is a failure it is worth spending a million to prove 
that for half of New South Wales nothing can be 
done. 

The Government of New South Wales, for the 
price at which it built the Central Railway Station, 
might have changed the map of Australia. Its own 
Royal Commission told it that it could put seven- 
teen locks on the Darling for £530,000. It is really 
no wonder the people of the Far West are a little 
bitter. It is not that they have any right to look 
for special favour from the State, because although 
they are out there under immeasurably the hardest 
conditions, turning the problematical half of New 
South Wales into use, and so might well be given 
every favour by far-seeing Governments, still it is 
their livelihood ; and if they choose to help them- 
selves that way they cannot demand favours on 
that account. But they can demand that their 
own Ministers, who are their Government as well 
as the Government for Sydney, should be able to 
look at their questions from their point of view. 

Yet it does seem impossible for a Government in 

Sydney, however well it wishes, to stand in the 

shoes of the Westerner and see things as he sees 

them. The West will get each of its wants just so 

soon as it can prove that that particular one is of 

16 



242 On the Wool Track 

benefit to Sydney ; and it will never get any others 
until it has the political sense to form itself into a 
separate State, with a capital neither at Sydney 
nor Melbourne nor Adelaide, but in Riverina or the 
Lower Murray, or in some part of those great river 
basins whose people have the same wants and the 
same problems, and could agree to spend their own 
money on their own projects with an eye to their 
own benefits ; and not to make life easier for the 
easy livers in a few great cities on the coast. 



XX 

THE BULLOCKY 

" You pray in' beg-gurr ! Ill teach you to pray." 

The big roan bullock was down on his 
knees. He looked to us to be doing a tremendous 
lot. It was evidently the impression which the 
big roan bullock intended to convey. But it did 
not take in the little bullocky. He flung his 
clumsy two-handed whip. 

" You beg-gurr," he said. *' That'll give you an 
idea." 

They did not often get ideas. They must have 
been painful things to indulge in. The big roan 
bullock hopped off his knees like a little dog. 

It struck us ordinary city men looking on that 
the bullocky, as a bullocky, had one fault. He did 
not hit his bullocks enough. He talked a lot about 
it. "Ill see to you in a minute," he would hiss. 
" 111 put t' tape on you. Ill give you sometin' to 
go on wid, by ghost I will." 

But he never did. He worked himself un- 
mercifully. When the whole clumsy arrangement 

243 



244 ^^ ^^^ Wool Track 

lurched, lurched, lur-r-rched, tilted its forty or fifty 
wool-bales as rakishly as a fashionable hat, and 
came slow — ly — to — a — fix with a heavy list to 
port, he creaked and muttered and groaned in his 
efforts to get it out as painfully as the huge axles 
themselves. But a more merciful man with animals 
one never saw. 

Perhaps the traditional bullock-driver does still 
exist, somewhere. Australia is crammed with 
stories of them — men who when their bullocks were 
struck would cut the maps of Australia on their 
backs with a whip, or chop at them with a spade, 
or even light a fire under them. All one can say is, 
I never came across even the tracks of that sort of 
man. The nearest I ever got to him was to find 
somebody who said he had once seen a fire lighted 
underneath a jibbing horse. 

Bullock-drivers may use fiercer language than 
other people in the bush. The foulest I heard by 
a long distance was from a shearer. I looked on 
whilst one bullock-driver managed his team for 
half an hour without using a single word that even 
a lay reader would call a swear-word. It must 
have been irritating work, too. It was in the 
mountains in the South, and he was loading tree 
trunks — "snigging" them into position (that is, 
dragging them along by their ends yoked up to 
some bullocks as if the trunk were a wagon), and 



^^ Proceed — Strawberry " 245 

" parbuckling " them on to the dray (which means 
looping a chain round them, making some bullocks 
pull it, and rolling the trunks up skids on to the 
wagon top). " You fool " was about the strongest 
expression that man used in twenty minutes. Some 
people, on being told this story, have obviously 
disbelieved it. 

And yet they have got a story of their own, out 
in the West, which would go to support it. A 
team was working on the Broken Hill road, and a 
bullock — the Beelzebub of the team — had gone 
obstinate, and the coach was passing. The whip 
was swinging; and some apt remarks were just 
forming on the back of the buUocky's tongue when 
he caught sight of a clerical hat on the front 
seat, and just in time thought better of it. He 
coughed politely. "Ahem — Strawberry," he said, 
" proceed ! " To his obvious astonishment Straw- 
berry proceeded. 

There is evidence obtainable, no doubt, that 
Western bullock-drivers have not forgotten how 
to express themselves. But it may be doubted 
if they really do so any more floridly than 
other people — miners, for instance. Anyway, 
when the day of pleading comes a plea of justifica- 
tion will probably serve the bullock-driver. For 
example : 

There was a driver, a big, kindly, bearded man, 



246 On the Wool Track 

who brought his load of wool across many days of 
quivering plain. Towards the end of one crawling 
afternoon in summer the team, with the load 
creaking behind it, shuffled up to the white gate of 
a railway yard. The slip of a porter boy from 
down-country had seen for the last half-hour a 
dust-storm approaching through the middle of the 
paddock, and came down to the gate to inspect. 
He was not old enough to have lost the official 
manner, but still he was a nice boy, and he asked 
if he should open the gate. The buUocky looked 
up across his bullocks at him for a moment, and 
then nodded. The boy opened the gate, and, being 
a town boy and not meaning any harm, stood in 
the gateway to watch. 

The driver from the other side swung the leading 
bullocks round towards the gate. They started, 
and then sheered off from it. He swung them 
again, and again they sheered away. He was very 
hot and tired, and very anxious to get the load up 
to the wool-bank early and step across the road 
for a drink, which had been in his mind for some 
hours. But he did not say a word. He put the 
leaders around again very patiently. Again they 
sheered off. At last he stepped round to the off- 
side to look. And as he reached the other side of 
the bullocks he found himself face to face with an 
innocent infant in railway uniform. He put his 



A Man of Position 247 

hands on his hips, drew in one long, slow breath. 
Then he opened. 

" You brass-buttoned, blanky, qualified, asterisked 
Government official,'' he began — it was five minutes 
before he drew breath again. The boy did not 
wait for it. He gave one cowering, shrivelled, 
bewildered glance at the big man, and then made 
for the station-house as fast as his legs could carry 
him. He was not frightened of being physically 
hurt. The big man would no more have thought 
of hitting a boy than a woman. But he shrank 
and fled under the sheer force of that language. 
That was how it affected a man. Bullocks do not 
have the power to realise that he is not going to 
hit them; besides, he generally is. So the effect 
of language on them is not really a strange 
matter. 

There is no bush character so well known or so 
much talked of as the bullock-driver. One knew 
all about him long before one ever went into the 
country. It is sad to lose illusions. But one has 
come back with very grave doubts whether that 
friend of our youth exists. 

A ''boss bullock-driver" in a country town is 
not a fairy-tale scapegrace. He is a considerable 
man. Very often he is a steady one. A ''boss 
buUocky " is a man who owns his own team, and 
perhaps more than one. He may have two 



248 On the Wool Track 

or three teams with a paid buUocky driving 
each. Amongst the lot of them there is a pro- 
portion that are pretty noisy whilst they are in 
town. But of what class in the bush cannot 
that be said ? 

A "boss bullocky" really superintends a very 
considerable business — the whole of the transport 
across a large part of Australia. If a sheep station 
or a mine or a hotel is started somewhere out near 
the bottom right-hand corner of the Northern 
Territory, it is the bullocky who has to take the 
sugar, tea, currants, and whole wagon-loads of 
drinks out, and to bring the bales of wool back. 
It is rather curious that out there the tea and 
sugar and currants count as the main load, and 
that the wool comes in as back freight. But it is a 
fact. 

One hardly realised what an immense field these 
men wander over in their business until one day in 
a small town at the very last end of the railways, 
a conversation with one of the leading forwarding 
agents there was interrupted by a woman who 
happened to be passing. She turned to him for a 
moment. 

''I hear the boss is kept out on one of the 
rivers,'' she said. 

" I wonder where that'll be/' he remarked. 
'' The Paroo or the Warrego, I expect." 



cc 



Out on the Rivers" 249 



'' I expect it is the Warrego," she said calmly, 
and went on. 

Probably the conversation was resumed. But 
if so, one was hardly listening. A remark had 
been made, and it was out of perspective. One's 
mind was trying all at once to scramble into the 
utterly new field of ideas which it opened up. 
It took a minute or two to get there. 

The remark meant that this woman's husband 
or father was bringing some wool teams, pre- 
sumably from a place somewhere near the 
frontiers of New South Wales and Queensland 
and South Australia, called Thargomindah. 
Thargomindah is actually in Queensland, but 
its wool sometimes comes to the railway in New 
South Wales. In getting there it has to cross 
240 miles of white and red country, of which 
every one hundred square miles probably contains 
one man, and most improbably one waterhole. 
But at two places there run across it depressions 
which hundreds of miles further up in Queens- 
land have been great rivers. Occasionally, when 
it rains in the Queensland hills, the water of 
those two fine rivers comes down and spills 
itself through these two depressions and over 
the plains beyond. The Warrego fairly often 
trickles into the Darling. The Paroo has been 
known to. 



250 On the Wool Track 

What had happened was that one of these 
rivers had come down. The boss had seen the 
streak of it miles ahead, and when he reached 
it he found it — as he probably had expected for 
several weeks past that he would find it — too 
fast or deep or wide or soft to cross. So he 
camped on the bank, and was now waiting three 
or four weeks till it subsided. 

As to which river it was there did not appear 
to be any definite information. He was some- 
where out on one or the other — didn't much 
matter which. They are only ninety miles or 
so apart. 

That is the sort of life it is. A man has camped 
three months on the bank of the Namoi waiting 
for it to fall. You find him right out on the 
plain, a stretcher of sacking on two poles, slung, 
as if it were a trough for his horse, under the 
back wheels of his wagon, the edges of the 
tarpaulin which covers the whole bulk of the 
load pulled as near down to the ground on either 
side as can be. And there he sleeps night after 
night very cosily, with his dog curled up just 
beneath him, and the fag-end of his camp fire, 
made up for the night, a few yards away. 

The freight is, on a very rough average, about 
£4 per ton per 100 miles. But it mostly depends 
on whether there is good grass or not. 



i 



Etiquette 251 

With luck a man may make three or four trips 
back to the same shed before the whole clip has 
left it. There is often a race for it, and a good deal 
of competition between different bullock-drivers as 
to which gets back in time. 

Stories are told of that competition. But, as 
a matter of fact, the rivalry hero, as in other 
cases out in the bush, is always decent. Not only 
is there a strong etiquette, which may not be 
talked of but is well recognised in all callings 
in the bush, but these men are in practically 
every case too generous to leave a mate in 
trouble. Two men may be racing for the railway. 
But if one gets bogged in a creek or a cowal 
(which is a small tree-grown, swampy depression 
often met in the red country), the other will 
never leave him there. He would not feel well 
if he left a man wallowing there when he might 
be lending him his team. Besides, in the West, 
who knows ? It may be his turn to-morrow. 

There have been brutes of buUockies, just as 
there have been brutes of bishops. But most 
average bullock-drivers are as fair to their bullocks 
as they are to their rivals. They keep the whip 
going for a certain space after the load gets stuck. 
But as soon as a man is convinced that the job is 
too heavy for his team, the chances are he will 
quietly take them out, and perhaps put them at it 



252 On the Wool Track 

again next day. After all, the bullocks are his 
capital. They are worth anything from £7 each. 
And they are easily enough lost, in all conscience, 
without his destroying them by lighting fires under 
them. It happens much too often that a man wakes 
up in the morning and finds £14 worth of bullock 
lying on its back amongst the thistles. Not so long 
since a mob of about 600 bullocks on the march from 
the North camped one evening on Noggabri Common, 
near Gunnedah. In the morning 585 were dead. 
There were thistles in the common ; and the only 
guess that can be made is that they came suddenly 
on to this prickly feed without having had the time 
to get used to it. This can happen to a bullock- 
driver any day. A drought is almost worse. One 
of the first big landholders at Bathurst used to tell 
of a forgotten drought in^ the '30's, during which 
eight bullock teams died in bringing his wool only 
150 miles to Sydney. 

Perhaps the buUocky has plenty of time to sit 
down and think of it. Anyway, of all the philo- 
sophers in Australia, Sydney and Melbourne 
Universities included, there is probably not one 
that gives so much of his time to original thought 
as the buUocky. The Prime Minister of England 
would find him worth listening to. He has quite 
a different manner from the quick-witted shearer 
or even the station hand. He is more deliberate. 



Political Philosopher 253 

He sits on an upturned box of groceries read- 
ing the paper — he is a man who always reads 
critically — or filling his pipe in front of the 
fierce fire. And he talks thoughtfully, almost 
dreamily, in the intervals. He has a way of 
looking upon men exactly as he looks on the 
animals in his team. 

" Terrible fat fellow, that fellow Smith," he says, 
looking up over his reading spectacles. 

" I didn't notice he was so stout," you remark. 

"Oh, he was in wonderful condition when I 
used to know him. I don't know what he's like 
when the condition's off* him. I've never seen him 
when he was poor." 

The buUocky has the most interesting collection 
of short stories that are to be heard in the bush. 
He has travelled longer than the shearer, and, not 
being a city man, he has noticed every single 
thing. He has been to stranger places. He was 
probably a drover once, and — well, drovers still 
bring cattle into Bourke, who say that in the 
first part of their journey they had to keep 
an eye on the blacks, whilst near its end they 
camped the cattle for the purpose of training 
them not to be scared at the sight of a man 
on foot. 

It is not always a " boss buUocky " who brings 
the bales from the woolshed to the railway. Most 



2 54 ^^ t^G Wool Track 

stations have their own buUocky, and often a horse 
team or two as well. Indeed, there is probably 
more wool brought in by horse teams in the West 
than by bullock teams. There may be 12 horses 
in a team, against 18 or 20 or 26 bullocks. I 
heard of 36 bullocks yoked up to one wagon in 
a hole. The horse teams are faster; and it may 
be taken for granted, an Australian prefers to deal 
with a horse where he can. 

"But in a hole," you are told, "gimme the 
bullocks. A 'orse is good to go when he's at it, 
but he hasn't got the heart. If 'orses get fixed 
for twenty minutes they're punctured. They won't 
pull any more, however long you stay there. But 
bullocks, they'll go back nex' day an' pull the 
same as ever." Mules have never caught on yet, 
but some people say they must, because of an 
argument that appeals eternally to the Australian. 
"They mus' be good. They're using 'em in 
America." 

Sydney people would be surprised if they knew 
how many of the bales which they see coming 
from the railway came to the other end of the 
railway on camels, one on each side of the hump. 
In a rainy year less, and in a dry year more, of 
it strings from the centre of Australia — from the 
very furthest civilisation — like an African caravan. 
And perhaps more ought to have been made of 



'^Ina Hole — Gimme Bullocks" 255 

the camels in these chapters. But it would take 
both a geography and history of Australia to do 
justice to the wool industry. And if the bullocky, 
with his 40 or 50 bales, which has been brought 
to the railway, has found the railway gates closed 
upon him, and has turned in till the morning — that 
for present purposes must suffice. 



XXI 

THE PORTER 

There is one man who is generally forgotten in 
the wool industry. People who would include the 
sheep-dog would leave him out. It is hardly fair, 
because he has a big part in it. 

Passengers by the mail train which left Sydney 
in the evening, and has rattled them away all 
night at any time on the second day, after they 
have washed the sleep out of their eyes, and break- 
fasted at Wellington, will roar now and again, 
twenty miles from anywhere, past a low platform 
with a name — and a small white tent tucked under 
some gum tree or myall or wilga near the white 
railway gate. There lives a man who for the time 
being is practically station-master and Chief Com- 
missioner and lord of all he surveys. A good half 
of the passengers at the windows do not even know 
that he exists. He is the special porter. 

The platform with the name is really the 
railway station for one of the wool towns. Some- 
times you see signs of the wool town if you look 

256 



The End of the World 257 

out for it amongst the scrub on the horizon — a 
scattered white-washed roof or two. Occasionally 
the long, narrow, blue iron woolshed is the only- 
part of it within sight. Now and again the wool- 
shed is fairly opposite the railway gates, and the 
station township, like any other township, is 
clustered quite close to the line. There is almost 
always built near the line some office of the great 
property through which it is running — a back 
station or an overseer's hut — even if it is only in a 
back paddock. Once, I remember, on a very out- 
of-the-way branch, where the one daily train took 
its business very easily indeed — the only sign of the 
wool township from which it took its name, and 
which must have been somewhere away over the 
plain at the back — was a line of telephone poles, 
with the loops of wire stretching away and away, 
and up and out of sight. It was one's first excursion 
into the real back country, and the plains stretching 
clear to the horizon, the land of galahs and mirage, 
which the train was reaching that evening, seemed 
to lie at the very end of the world. There was in 
this case a public-house and a post-office opposite 
the railway, it is true, and a wilderness behind 
them. On the edge of the wilderness waited a 
solitary buggy and a girl But nothing had pre- 
pared one to find, on that platform, in what to us 

seemed a forgotten corner of the great Australian 

17 



258 On the Wool Track 

desert, two other smartly dressed girls in pretty 
sun-hats, who waited until a third pretty girl from 
Melbourne jumped from the train and fell on their 
necks, and then carried her off into the wilderness 
with them. However, that is another affair. To 
the wool siding at one time of the year will come 
passengers — a score or two of them within two or 
three days — who climb down from the mail train, 
and lift down their swags and their bicycles. As 
the train pulls out they are already stringing off 
through the white gate, the hubs and spokes of 
their bicycles twinkling across the paddock. A 
few days afterwards, up from the horizon at sunset, 
comes the first dust-storm. An hour or so later you 
catch the far-off crack of a whip and the creak of 
an axle-box. Presently the first team of shiny 
sweating bay horses pulls up to the railway gates. 
As it is after six the gates are shut. They will not 
open until six in the morning. The team is taken 
out. If there is no hotel, a red flicker breaks out 
a little later. It is the only sign of the hard work 
which begins with sunrise to-morrow. 

The wool season is not a very long one, but it 
is all the time the carrier — teamster or buUocky — 
has for making the main profit of the year. As 
one after another of the sheds in the plain at the 
back of the railway gets to work, the country for 
the time being begins to carry quite a respectable 



Etiquette of Strict Precedence 259 

population. There are stores to take out, and 
wool to bring in. The teams turn up at the rail- 
way gates by twos and threes, every teamster 
anxious to get his load into the trucks double 
quick, and get back for another load. 

If many teams are waiting ahead of him a 
carrier may be kept at the railway yard all day 
wasting his precious time, because the wagons 
are taken in the order in which they arrive at 
the yard. Any team which arrives before six at 
night is allowed into the yard, and once that 
teamster is in he can unload until long after six. 
But if he is not at the gates by six p.m. he has to 
wait till the gates open again at six a.m. Many 
teams may arrive after dark. They push on in 
order not to lose theii place. They are arriving 
throughout Sunday, when the yard is closed. 
And on Monday morning, in big centres like 
Bourke, there are sometimes 18 or 20 of them 
strung out one behind the other like a funeral 
down a quarter of a mile of the street leading to 
the gates of the yard. 

It is only natural that there has been a good 
deal of rivalry, before now, to be early in to the 
wool bank; because even at big centres there 
would only be two or three porters to load, and 
the last man in that morning s line might not get 
away before sundown. Some drivers will camp 



26o On the Wool Track 

opposite the gate, and even leave their teams in 
all night. But as a rule it is not necessary. 
Because here, again, there comes in that etiquette 
with which you have to reckon all through the 
bush. It must not be thought, because it is so 
often referred to here, that it is a thing which is 
always being talked about. It is no more self- 
conscious than the code which usually prevents 
one passenger from taking another's seat in a 
railway train. But it is equally strong because 
it is equally reasonable. It is not generally 
necessary for a buUocky or teamster to take 
elaborate precautions to keep his place at the 
railway gates, because even if he misses it and 
turns up late, it is not the thing for the others to 
slip in before him. A bullocky probably would 
not have used those words, but the way the 
station-master put it was : " It's not — er — etiquette." 

One morning whilst I was in Bourke four teams 
were waiting outside the railway gates. At six a.m. 
the gates opened, and three were driven in. The 
driver who was first in the line was a little late. 
Some time after the station-master walked down to 
the wool bank, and found the three others squatting 
on the bank smoking. 

" Hullo, what's up ? " he asked. 

" Waitin' for Bill," they said. 

" Hang Bill. You get on," answered the station- 



More Etiquette 261 

master. Of course that relieved them of responsi- 
bility. They had to take Bill's place when the 
authorities told them to. But they would not have 
done so otherwise. 

The wool bank is a high platform level with the 
truck, and built there to make the loading of bales 
easy. Two or three wagons draw up alongside it 
at a time, and the driver of each will help the 
porters to load his own particular wool. Some 
men may be slower about the work than others, 
and it must be galling at times to those behind 
who are itching to get away. But the one thing 
they do not do is to show it. It is not etiquette 
to grouse. 

As long as there are trucks enough the loading 
goes straight ahead into the trucks. Each wagon 
is weighed in as it comes into the yard with its 
load on, and weighed out again as it leaves 
it empty — in order to find the net weight of 
load. A porter checks the weighing, and the 
buUocky is given a receipt. He sometimes tries 
to obtain a clean receipt — a statement that the 
bales were received in good order. He is lucky 
if he gets it. 

But sometimes, especially at the small wool 
sidings in between the main centres, the trucks 
cannot always be had when they are wanted. Just 
when the people at that wool township are wanting 



262 On the Wool Track 

them there are many other wool townships after 
them also. In that case they do not keep the 
teamster waiting. Probably there is no wool bank. 
But they let him choose a dry place near to the line, 
and leave his wool there. Usually there is some 
bit of high ground which will do. It is important 
to keep the wool dry, because bales will become so 
heated if rain soaks into them that they have been 
known to burn by " spontaneous combustion." The 
railway supplies a tarpaulin to cover the wool, but 
not to be put on the ground underneath it. A 
careful driver can dig a trench round his wool if 
he cares to. Which does not mean that he always 
does it. 

Now the driver's work ends there ; and the rest 
of the job is done by a man of whom very few 
people know anything. These wool sidings have 
no staff during three-quarters of the year. During 
the other quarter they have one porter. He is 
probably under the authority of the station-master 
at the next station up or down the line ; but that 
may be twenty miles or more. The porter camps by 
the railway fence. He receives the wool. And he, 
to all intents and purposes (except for five minutes 
in the day when the guard of the visiting goods 
train happens to be on the platform, and auto- 
matically takes for the time the command of it 
like a visiting admiral), has upon him the whole 



A Science 263 

responsibility of the Chief Commissioner for 
Railways. 

The engine-drivers and firemen and guards— the 
men who have their homes in town, and who camp 
in sleeping-rooms at the railway station when they 
get to the country terminus — these are the 
sophisticated men of the bush, the men who go 
daily to the great city and mix with officials and 
politicians. But this porter, as a rule, is not a 
permanent railway hand. He is a man chosen in 
one of the country railway districts, perhaps from 
Bathurst or Blayney, and taken on for three months 
or more specially for this work. He is generally a 
man who knows what wool looks like — because he 
has to handle it and give receipts for it ; and if he 
does not know whether there is anything wrong 
with the bales, or if they are quite secure when he 
has loaded them, there is no one within twenty 
miles whom he can very well ask. 

One had a vague idea before going West that 
they leaded wool by piling it into a truck. It was 
only a beginning of a series of disillusionments to 
find that was the one thing they particularly 
avoided. Wool is not piled into a truck. It is 
built up on it, in four tiers, on a certain system, by 
which every tier locks the tier underneath it. The 
fourth tier of five bales placed side by side along 
the very crown of the load locks every tier under- 



264 On the Wool Track 

neath it. And the only fastening needed is an 
easy lashing over the top of the truck, which locks 
those five bales in their turn, and a couple of minor 
bindings. 

Loading is a complete science — a very pretty one. 
There is one system for loading undumped wool; 
quite another for loading dumped wool; another 
for wheat bags ; another for chaff. Each depends 
on the shape of the bag or bale. Chaff sacks are 
loaded on edge, because the bottom corners of a 
chaff sack protrude like ears, and lap over the sack 
beneath, so as to lock. As for wheat, if it is 
properly loaded the bags need not be counted. 
They know that in a Carnegie truck (that is, they 
say, a 15 -ton truck, a number of which were 
brought from Mr Carnegie's steel-works at Pitts- 
burg) there will be exactly 185 bags. 

The ordinary undumped wool bales are built up 
like bricks, and, provided they are as regular in 
size as bricks, which they ought to be, exactly 
45 to 47 of them can be put into a big truck, and 
38 to 40 in a small one. It makes no difference to 
the number that can be got into the truck whether 
the wool is greasy or scoured, because a bale of 
scoured wool, though it has lost all the grease in it, 
and weighs very much less than a bale of greasy, 
takes up the same room. Now, the railway only 
charges freight on the weight of the wool. Con- 



Enterprise Unrecognised 265 

sequently, if scoured wool only paid the same rate 
per ton as greasy wool, a truck of scoured would 
be earning much less than a truck of greasy. To 
make up for this, scoured wool is charged a little 
more heavily than greasy. It costs £3, 9s. 2d. to 
send a ton of greasy wool from Bourke to Sydney, 
and £3, 15s. 5d. to send a ton of scoured wool. 

That seems perfectly fair, because scoured wool 
takes up more room for its weight than greasy. 
What does not seem fair is, that if the station goes 
further and has the enterprise to squash each bale 
of scoured wool into about two-thirds of its original 
size by dumping it (which means binding it round 
with two bands of iron so tightly that what was 
the length of it becomes about the same as the 
breadth), that station should still have to pay the 
same freight as on scoured wool not dumped. Both 
dumping and scouring are done to save useless 
weight and space from being hauled about; and 
space in the State's trucks can be saved by dumping, 
and the woolshed is the proper place to do this ; 
and an allowance ought to be made for it, as is 
done in Queensland. 

When the buUocky and the porter together 
have tugged, shoved, heaved, steered, slewed the 
bullocky's bales from the wagon up to the truck 
and crawled all over them like ants, and hooked 
them over other bales and into their exact places, 



266 On the Wool Track 

or when the buUocky has been allowed to stack 
his wool by the line for want of a truck, the 
buUocky's work is done. But not the porter's. 

It may be late on into the night. But once the 
wool is on the truck the railway takes on itself the 
responsibility for it. The railway man could not 
turn in snug into his tent and leave the sky out- 
side bulging with big rain-clouds and the wool 
stacked without a cover. The porter has to lash it, 
and sheet it with tarpaulin. If it did rain, and the 
wool were uncovered, and were found to be wet 
and had to be opened and dried and repacked — 
which costs the railway 10s. per bale — the porter 
would hear further of it. 

It is all very well at big cities with two porters. 
But the solitary man at the wool siding has a 
heavy day. He has no wool bank to load from on 
a level with the truck. He has to haul every bale 
up from the wagon top, a foot or two below. It 
is not always easy to make a neat load in those 
places. When the train calls for the truck the 
guard has to inspect the loading and check it ; and 
even then the station-master at the next station has 
to give another look to it. 

For it has happened before now that a bale has 
fallen off whilst the train is going. If it falls 
between two trucks it may throw one of them off 
the rails. The truck thrown off bumps along 



what may Happen 267 

innocently in the middle of the train, kept straight 
by the trucks ahead and astern of it until probably 
it lurches too heavily, and its axle breaks. 

After that anything may happen. But, what- 
ever happens, seeing that on most of the far-back 
lines a train behind may always follow on thirty 
minutes after the train ahead, the guard goes back 
along the line as fast as he can, taking six fog- 
signals, and lays them in pairs along the metals 
from 800 to 1200 yards. Then he can go back at 
his leisure and help to lift the truck back, or 
topple it over off the line, or send the engine 
on for help, or do whatever seems best in his 
discretion. 

What with the science of loading, and the 
chance of a summer storm wetting any stacked 
wool before he can cover it, the special porter has 
often an anxious time. But they say that this 
year trucks may be fairly plentiful again; and 
even in former times it has not been often that 
more than a hundred bales have had to be stacked 
at once. Wool trucks do not seem to have been 
cornered in the way in which, by all accounts 
up-country, the stock trucks last season almost un- 
doubtedly were, by way of pure monetary specula- 
tion, when they were most bitterly needed. 

But that again is another story. 



XXII 

OUTWARD BOUND 

Evidently it was a scene in the Chamber. Being 
a mere Australian, one stood in the corridor casting 
about for the cause of the din from behind the 
big polished doors. But a Frenchman would have 
known offhand. Without doubt it will be Sir 
Reid interpellating the President of the Common- 
wealth Chamber of Deputies. One swings the 
door open. The uproar begins again. The 
Frenchman must be right. 

The President of the Chamber sits high on 
his seat like a judge on the bench facing the 
deputies. On either side of him — a man scribbling. 
Below, in the place of the Clerk of the House — 
other men with pens. In a box on the right a 
crowd of reporters. This half of the Chamber 
mute, impassive, intent. The other — a dog-fight. 

An elderly German in the white suit and 
cummerbund of an operatic colonist waves his 
hands frantically. He bawls, " One . . . One 

268 



A Scene 269 

One . . . One/' like the foghorn of a steamer 
backing amongst traffic. An American below, 
posed like an orator, frowning like Napoleon, 
melodramatically hypnotises the President with 
one hand. ''Wahn — wahn — wahn," he cries. 
Above, a chubby French boy : " Won — won — won 
— won — won," always shooting out his hand intent 
to pierce the President. A second elderly German 
folds all his fingers over his face. He opens them 
periodically like the swell-box of an organ and 
roars. The foghorn answers, '' One — one — one." 

The deputies occupy an amphitheatre opposite 
the President. There seem about ninety present; 
eighty of them silent behind their little desks. 
The rest leap like Jacks - in - the - box, stand 
shouting, waving, gesticulating like fanatics. De- 
cidedly a demonstration by the extreme right in 
the Commonwealth Chamber of Deputies. 

Imagine this all at once : 

" Eight a half." 

" Three— Three— Three— Three." 

"ThreeThreeThreeThreeThree— Nine— Nine." 

" Nine— Nine — Nine." 

"NeyNeyNey — Ney — Nine — Nine — Nine." 

" One One One." 

" Won Won Won Won Won Won Won." 
'^ 'alf." 

A Frenchman says "'alf," and it ends as 



270 On the Wool Track 

suddenly as it began. They all sit down red in 
the face, mopping their foreheads. 

Then in a flash the mystery explains itself. 
The President says quietly, " Eight an' a half — 
Rougineau," and taps his desk with a small 
hammer. 

It is not the Chamber of Deputies. It is the 
Sydney wool-sales. 

Towards the end of winter a number of well- 
paid foreign gentlemen arrive to buy the wool in 
Sydney. Towards the end of the summer they 
sail home again, and find out roughly what wool 
their principals will be wanting next season. 
Towards the end of winter they come back again 
to buy it. 

Nearly all the Sydney wool goes to foreigners. 
Last year it went mostly to France. France 
took 264,000 bales, England 245,000, and Germany 
225,000, Belgium 91,000, America 27,000, and 
Japan 8000. Perhaps people now alive will live 
to see the last name first on the list. 

The amount of wool that England buys from 
New South Wales has halved itself in the last 
ten years. As late as the Boer War, England 
bought 64 per cent, of all the wool from Sydney, 
and foreigners only 36. Last year England 
bought 28^, and foreigners 71 J. The decrease 
has been almost yearly. 



Why England sets Fashions 271 

The English are not great manufacturers of 
Australian wool. Foreigners are. The English 
have never specialised in manufacturing fine 
wools. Far back in these articles it was ex- 
plained that the true English sheep is an 
animal about the size of a small calf, with 
enormous joints of tender meat and a long 
coarse wool. That sheep is as pure-bred as 
any merino, but because it is not pure merino 
Australians have come to call it "cross-bred." 
England used to be — and though few realise 
it, still is — a great wool -producing country. 
There are still 30,000,000 of these big sheep 
in England — not far behind the numbers of New 
South Wales; and the English have always 
stood by their long coarse wool. They make 
serges and rough tweeds (Harris and Cheviot) 
and cloths for men's clothes out of it — tailors' 
cloths. They do not specialise in the fine fabrics 
for women's dresses. Germany and France 
do that. 

That is the real original reason why England 
always sets the fashion in men's dress, whilst 
women's fashions are set in Paris. That is also 
why the French and Germans want merino more 
than the English. It is noticed that fine merino 
— wool that will wind out longer than 64 hanks 
to the lb. — is bought in Australia by French 



2 72 On the Wool Track 

and Germans. They seldom go below 64's. The 
English seldom above. 

But the cream of Australian wool is skimmed 
by Americans. They will pay any price for it — 
the highest generally in Victoria. They must 
have it for this reason. There is plenty of good 
wool in America, hedged round with a heavy 
tariff. It is useless shouldering wool from out- 
side over that tariff unless it is wool that cannot 
be grown inside at any price. The best Australian 
wool is unapproachable — clean, bright wool, 
where American is full of earth. American 
manufacturers bring it down to a healthy level 
by a plentiful dilution of their own. 

Germans, French, and Americans prefer to buy 
in Australia and get first pick. They have 
forced some English firms to follow them. But 
the English prefer to buy at the London sales, 
where they can choose their time. In the old 
days all the Australian wool was sold in London. 
The London sales are still the biggest in the 
world. But every Australian State except 
Western Australia now has its own sales, and 
they are growing hand over hand. Wool is sold 
at two places in Victoria — Melbourne and Geelong. 
The Sydney sales, which are bigger than the 
other Australian sales put together, are coming 
near to the London ones. There were 1,045,000 



English Trade Decreasing 273 

bales of Australian wool sold in London last 
year, and 752,000 in Sydney. The foreign town 
where wool auctions are held is Antwerp. 

That the English prefer to buy in London is not 
enough to account for the decrease of English- 
Sydney trade, because since 1900, when England 
bought 64*1 per cent, of all wool leaving Sydney, 
the increase in the Sydney sales has only been 18*7 
per cent., whilst the decrease in the wool taken by 
England from Sydney has been 35'7. England is 
the largest buyer at other Australian sales. But 
nearly all the Sydney wool goes to the Continent. 

So most of that pandemonium is made by 
foreigners, and the most demonstrative of the 
foreigners are Germans. At a first glance one puts 
down the most excitable men in the tumult as 
French. But they were not. The strangest calls, 
the most unrestrained gesticulators, come from the 
Germans — probably because the wildest competition 
comes from the Germans. It is that which causes 
the cat-calls. In this way : 

When wool is knocked down at a price, the man 

who first made that price gets it. There may be 

fifteen of them shouting the price for ten seconds 

before the hammer falls. The auctioneer may 

reasonably forget w^ho did make the price. So 

they invent distinctive yells to remind him. The 

elderly German is making noises like a schoolboy, 

18 



2 74 O^ the Wool Track 

with his hands in front of his face, in order to be 
original. That call is his idea. 

At some sales the buyers have jumped on their 
seats, scrambled on one another's backs down the 
alley, edged right to the table where the clerk of 
parliaments should be, and finished bawling at 
the auctioneer within a few feet of his face. A 
man has been seen to get one leg over his desk and 
wave it wildly at the auctioneer. But all the 
buyers are not so demonstrative — Anglo-Saxons, 
for example, and certain others. High up, on the 
back tiers mostly, sit a few quiet dark men, with 
black coats and well-brushed black hair, hour after 
hour ticking off the sales on their catalogues. They 
know what they want. Over a half -spent pan- 
demonium — " half, half, half, half," — you hear one 
quiet " three,'' and the lot goes down to the Japanese 
buyers. They will probably need more wool every 
year. If Australia does not supply the whole of it 
she is not doing her work. 

The actual wool being sold is lying miles away 
across the city under low dark floors, down dim 
passage-ways, between great iron-bark pillars in 
some wool store. About a third of each lot is on 
the top floor, under the bright glare of a roof mostly 
made up of skylights — every bale slit open, and 
the bright wool tumbling out of it like froth from 
a pewter pot. To that carefully lighted floor. 



The Top Floor 275 

whenever that store happens to be selling, they 
bring about every third bale. During the morning 
the buyers have gone there in white overalls, like 
motorists, catalogue in hand, sampled every lot, and 
made a note on their catalogues of the price to 
which they are prepared to go. The broker's price 
is already printed there. Then the buyers go back 
to their chamber at the Royal Exchange. The 
firm's auctioneer takes his turn — selling 200, 1000, 
perhaps 1500 bales. 

It may have been a lot of first pieces — greasy — 
that was selling when we came in. The broker's 
price in the catalogue (for one pound of wool) was 
8^d. The sales go by farthing rises. The meaning 
of the hieroglyphics printed above is as follows : 

A German first offered 8|d. What he said was 
"eight a half" (that is halfpenny). Another German 
raised the price to 8|d. He said '' three " (three- 
farthings). A Frenchman cut in the next moment 
with the same offer — " three." Seeing the German 
had beaten him the Frenchman raised his bid to 
"nine" (9d.). A German and Belgian struck in 
simultaneously with "nine." All three and more 
shouted " nine," until the elderly minute-gun roared 
" one, one, one " (one farthing — did.). The French- 
man rose neck and neck with him — "won, won, 
won." That uproar continued till the Frenchman 
said " 'alf." 



276 On the Wool Track 

He had raised it to 9|d. The limit which the 
others had noted on their catalogues was 9J. So 
they stopped. The wool, instead of going to 
Hamburg or Antwerp, went to Havre. 

When a man has bought a lot he goes back to 
the top floor of the wool store and sees all the 
bales. If, for example, he finds a bale of pieces has 
been marked " fleeces " by mistake, the bale is 
withdrawn. If out in the real Australia they have 
forgotten to put the station brand on a bale, and 
the wool store paints it on instead, there is a 
protest at once. No one may mark a bale except 
the grower. If a broker suspects that a buyer 
wants to be quit of a heavy price they go to 
arbitration. All this and much more is what is 
meant when one hears of that strict honest code, 
the rules of the Sydney wool sales. 

All this is modern and scientific. There are 
other Sydney methods that would interest an 
archaeologist. 

The port of Sydney is really older than the port 
of London. It dates back to the dim past before 
the coming of the railway train. The other day 
there wandered into Sussex Street an Australian 
who had left Australia as a little boy. In the 
interval he had grown to love London, and he 
was homesick. Some vague reminiscence back 
in his brain brought him to a stand in Sussex 



Before Railways 277 

street. The long line of storehouses, the procession 
of carts lumbering both ways, the air heavy almost 
to mistiness, thick enough for hay-fever, with a 
mixture of dust and chaff and cheese, and a certain 
subdued monotone of tarred rope ends running 
through it, puzzled him. He had stood in that 
place before— but when ? 

The answer flashed on him. It was not quite 
the same. But given a dismal rain, cobble stones 
covered with a thin layer of greasy mud, railway 
vans hooded with dripping black tarpaulins instead 
of open lorries, and a distant suspicion of Billings- 
gate — and he was looking at Lower Thames Street, 
London, and no other. 

The truth is, the port of Sydney is really the 
older of the two. The port of Sydney was out of 
date within fifty years of its discovery. Because 
then the railways came to other ports and brought 
cargoes to the ship's side, or took them from the 
wharves, and the age of the modern port began. 
Sydney never entered that age. Circular Quay, 
Farm Cove, Woolloomooloo, Darling Harbour, were 
built over long before with wharves and ware- 
houses and streets leading to them. Not an inch 
was left for the railway when that came knocking 
at the city gates. 

The railway did not get to the riverside in Old 
London either. But it did crawl down on to the 



278 On the Wool Track 

river flats below the city and meet the ships there. 
And a new London grew up around it. The old 
port of London by London Bridge was abandoned 
to the lighters and Dutch barges. The old ware- 
houses huddle there still. The drays still crawl 
like a stream of ants up and down Lower 
Thames Street. But the port of London has 
gone far down the river. The city that was built 
there is a newer city than the city of Sydney. 

So Sydney is really an old-world port — so old as 
to be almost obsolete. It cannot be quite obsolete, 
because berths where great steamers can lie and 
poke their noses in at the back windows of the 
city cannot be abandoned, railway or no railway. 
But something will have to be done to make 
Sydney a modern port like Liverpool. The shore 
is too costly to resume ; the rock under Sydney 
makes tunnelling expensive. An overhead line 
above the base of the wharves, with the advantages 
of overhead loading, may some day be built in 
Sydney as well as in Liverpool. 

To this antediluvian port on its magnificent 
harbour come yearly about a million bales of wool. 
The wool train backs into a semicircular shed. 
Across a semicircular platform like a fringe are 
the wool-contractors' carts. 

Almost every bale has to be carted through the 
narrow streets, backed across the footpath into 



As on the Paroo 279 

the wool store, unloaded, stored. After the sale 
it threads its way to the ship through the heart 
of the town in front of the trams and behind the 
buses, piled twenty or thirty bales on a lorry, 
with exactly the same scientific appliances — camels 
excepted — as when it lurched across the desert 
from the Four Corners to the Paroo. That is how 
wool gets from the railway to the ship in Sydney 
these last days of 1909. 

If people were prophets they would have 
clubbed all the wool stores outside the city, and 
let the trains run in and out of them ; just as in 
Melbourne they slaughter sheep and freeze them 
in one building, and truck them without man 
handling to the ship. Perhaps it is not too late 
to concentrate the wool stores around Pyrmont, 
even now. But there is a huge capital sunk in 
them. In Winchcombe, Carson's new store, there 
will be eight and a quarter acres, in five floors, 
each 300 by 240 feet. There will be 30^ miles of 
hard-wood joists, 4 miles of iron-bark girders, 3^ 
of posts and bearers, 160 of flooring. 

They must use wood, not steel, in these stores 
for fear of fire. Where steel buckles and lets the 
building down, iron-bark stands straight until it is 
eaten through. And those posts hold up a huge 
wealth. In Dalgety & Co.'s big store alone on 
Tuesday last there were 50,000 bales. Putting each 



2 8o On the Wool Track 

at £11, 15s., there was £562,500 in that store. 
That is why the posts that support it are 16 inches 
by 16. 

Those bales covered six acres, and they had come 
in ten, twenty, or thirty at a time. But they 
could find instantly any one bale of any lot, and 
wheel it up to you on the top floor within a few 
minutes. That store is built close over its own 
wharf. Steamers of 12,000 tons lie one side of the 
wharf. On the other, high up in the store, they 
shoot the bales down to any floor, wheel them to a 
hydraulic press, which squeezes each into less than 
a span's breadth; bind them with iron hooping, 
and tumble them into long pipes leading from the 
upper floor across the road to the very ship's side. 
Bales have come to the store and been passed 
through it, dumped and all, to the wharf within 
four minutes. 

Alongside that wharf there lies to-day not a 
12,000-ton steamer, but a stately, beautiful sailing 
ship. There are only three or four sailers carrying 
wool these days — mostly training ships. The 
German Sophie Charlottey the British ship Port 
Jackson, are two. The Mersey , with sixty cadets 
all trained for four or five years, and all pledged to 
become officers in the White Star line, was the 
third. There lies there to-day nearly the last of a 
great line of tradings reaching back to Nelson's 



The Last Act 281 

time. She is like a beautiful memory. But it is 
really to the days when those graceful clipper bows 
were ranged round Circular Quay, when the 
captains kept open ship, when the incomings were 
a matter of ceremony, and at their outgoings the 
fiddler sat on the capstan and gave tune whilst 
the hands hove the cable home, and other crews 
all round the quay cheered her as she passed — it is 
to those days the port of Sydney belongs. 



XXIII 

THE LAST CHAPTER 

And so it comes to the last chapter. It is a 
strange thing that, though one asked again and 
again of wool-growers and wool-classers out on the 
stations, none of them was able to explain the 
processes that would happen to their wool when it 
came to the last chapter of the story. Afterwards 
one found that this chapter and some which had 
gone before it all hung on the difference between 
" carding " and " combing." 

Carding and combing are two different ways of 
making a woollen thread. The two threads may 
be equally strong and equally valuable ; but they 
look different, they feel different, and they have 
different uses. 

Wool is not really the smooth, sleek hair that it 
looks. It differs from hair in being sheathed with 
strong, rough-edged scales. Hair is sheathed with 
scales, too, ,but they are smooth ones. Under 
the microscope wool looks like the rough trunk 

282 



Why Wool makes Cloth 283 

of a date-palm. Merino wool is particularly 
scaly. 

The reason why wool is more valuable than hair 
or cotton is that when these horny threads of it are 
laid across one another they interlock. You can 
bind cotton fibres into a thread by laying them 
parallel and twisting them like rope. But not by 
laying them across one another. They do not 
hook on. Wool does. The process by which the 
fibres of wool are laid across one another so as to 
hook on is " carding." 

They have invented a machine which takes the 
wool exactly as it comes from the scour — except 
for a little oil sprinkled on it to keep it from flying, 
— automatically weighs out to itself small quantities 
of it every minute or so, and then proceeds first to 
separate them and break up the order in which the 
fibres have arranged themselves on the sheep's 
back, and afterwards to relay them across one 
another at every possible angle and separate them 
and relay them again and again and again till they 
are so matted that when automatically stripped 
from the last roller in the great machine they come 
off* in the form of a thin, gauzy film — utterly with- 
out strength, but still hanging together if delicately 
handled. 

The way in which the machine lays and relays 
the fibres is by catching them on rollers clothed 



284 On the Wool Track 

with millions of small teeth, from which other 
rollers with gradually diminishing teeth pick them 
off and shuffle them, and eventually let them pass 
to still smaller rollers further on. The wool 
moves from end to end of this machine in the form 
of a thin film of fluff, coating the teeth of the 
rollers. The teeth are really small bent wires fixed 
by the million into ''card-clothing" of leather or 
other material. In one big machine there will 
be 56,000,000 teeth. The cylinders bristle with 
wire like thistles. One sort of thistle — the teasel 
— used to be used for carding, and is still used in 
some factories for raising the nap on cloth. Now, 
the Latin for thistle is " carduus," and the French 
for teasel is " chardon," and the English for a sort 
of thistle artichoke is " cardoon," and that is how 
'' carding " came to be called carding. 

They may not be satisfied with one shuffling of 
these wool fibres. They may put them through 
two or three carding machines, always with smaller 
teeth — teeth so small that on the last cylinder 
their surface feels like emery paper. But the 
process is the same. The wool comes off the last 
machine hanging together, not because of any twist 
or any strain put on it, but merely entangled. 
It is whilst this thin sheet of fluffy stuff is leaving 
the last cylinder that the real thread-making 
begins. 



The Beginning of Thread 285 

About a hundred narrow parallel bands pass 
through the film, and each carries off on its surface 
a continuous strip of it. Each delivers its strip 
between a pair of leather rollers — rubbers — which 
rub their surface constantly backwards and for- 
wards as the wool works through, exactly as a 
man rubs tobacco between his hands, so that the 
strips come out rolled, but without any twist. 
Each strip is called a " sliver.'' It looks like a 
thread of knitting wool, but having no twist it is 
without strength. 

It takes only one act to turn these soft, feeble 
" slivers " into a strong woollen thread. That loose 
conglomeration of fibres has only to be tightly 
twisted to find it very firm. And that is what 
** spinning'' is. The '^slivers" are taken to the 
spinning frame — perhaps a hundred of them at a 
time. The end of each is fixed on to one of a row 
of spindles. The spindles automatically retreat 
four or five yards across the floor, drawing out 
the hundred soft threads after them. Then the 
spindles suddenly start revolving 5000 times a 
minute, each winding the thread on to itself, and 
giving it a twist stiffer than that of a wrung towel ; 
and the frame slowly works back to the " slivers" 
to repeat the process. 

The thin, strong woollen thread which results 
from that twisting is called "woollen yarn" or 



2 86 On the Wool Track 

"carded thread." It is the result of a sort of 
barbed wire entanglement, a confusion of fibres 
worse confounded. The ends of the fibres stick 
out of its surface in all directions, though they are 
twisted almost into a solid mass in the core of it. 




1 2 

The Two Great Processes. 

1, Woollen thread. — Carded, tangled (under 

the microscope). 

2. Worsted thread.— Combed out and twisted 

(under the microscope). 

These ends make a soft, fluffy covering to the 
thread like the down on a peach. That soft, furry 
surface bloom they specially aim at producing. 
As it is the result of the ends of the fibres standing 
out of the thread, it follows that they want for these 
soft threads a wool with many ends. A very long 
fine wool is not a good wool for this, because its 



The End of it All 287 

ends are too few. A short wool is sufficient for 
the entangling process, and it gives a softer surface. 
And that is the reason why short wools are used 
for carded thread. 

The second way in which wool is made into 
thread is almost the exact opposite of the first. It 
takes very little account of the hooked scales — the 
''serrations" of the wool. Instead of mixing up 
the fibres and entangling them, it makes a thread 
much as they make a thread of cotton — by laying 
the fibres neatly alongside of one another, and then 
drawing them out and twisting them as a string is 
twisted. 

It is not much use laying very short ends of wool 
alongside one another, and hoping to bind them by 
giving them a twist; because there will not be 
enough twist in their length, and they will come 
apart on being strained. For that reason a long 
wool had to be used for making this thread. That 
long wool has first to be cleared of any short fibres 
that are in it. The short wool is combed out of it. 
That is how the whole process (which is really a 
sort of twisting of long threads) goes by the name 
of " combing." 

And so there, in Sydney, standing in a long 
rackety room full of revolving steel contrivances, 
before a machine in which two small circular 
combs revolved inside a large circular comb, and 



288 On the Wool Track 

tore the white band that was fed to them fibre 
from fibre, delivering the short torn wool and a 
burr here and there, and maybe bits of second cut 
into a cylinder beneath, and passing out at the back 
a continuous band of long straight gleaming white 
— there for the first time one saw laid open a clear 
chain of causes of which the other end stretched 
away and back as far as the Central Australian 
paddocks and the red, sand-covered, quivering, 
dazzling plain. It was to breed a wool which 
would escape that bucket under there, and would 
be drawn off from the combs in that stream which 
passed out over the back of the machine, that they 
were working year in and year out amidst their 
droughts and their dust-storms and their little 
desert towns. Here one was looking calmly on 
whilst their great task was working past the test 
of this jagging, jarring machine. 

So that was why in the darkness of the big 
shed, with the glare of Central Australia peeping 
through the chinks, they had separated the fleeces 
into " combings " and " clothings." The "combings " 
were the long fleeces that would stand this test, and 
would be made into a fine, shiny, clean-surfaced 
thread by being laid parallel, drawn out, twisted. 
The "clothings'' were the shorter fleeces which 
would be made into a soft, furry thread by being 
entangled and then twisted — the sort of thread out 



"We Have Changed All That" 289 

of which English clothing was, and still is, mostly 
manufactured. 

That — very loosely explained — is the reason for 
the old distinction between the ^' combing '* and the 
"clothing/' It has almost been broken down in 
these days, because the Germans have invented 
and are using machines for combing not only wools 
with a long staple, but comparatively short wools 
also. Even " pieces " and " bellies " can be combed 
nowadays. It is a question whether some of the 
wool of the sheep that are sent to Sydney for meat 
— whose skins are made into leather and glue, and 
their fat into tallow and soap — cannot be combed 
also. If it can, there will be room for big profits 
in Sydney. 

So it does not follow that " combing " wool is the 
only sort used for combing in these days. In 
England they generally comb only the long wool ; 
but abroad they comb almost anything. Whether 
the foreign method can ever give quite the same 
strength which the British method gives to the 
thread, is very much to be doubted. But the 
British method is inherited from a day when a 
lady's dress was passed as a legacy to her daughter 
and her granddaughter. And — we have changed 
all that. 

The mere combing does not make combed wool 

into a thread. It merely separates the long wool 

19 



290 On the Wool Track 

which will be made into a thread in that way, 
The "noil," the short stuff which fell into the 
bucket, will have the burr burnt out of it with 
acid, and will afterwards be carded into soft 
woollen thread. But the long wool which passes 
the comb will be made into a hard-faced thread 
in several operations besides the mere combing. 
Even before it is combed it is carded like the other 
wool in order to break up the arrangement in 
which it grew on the sheep's back, and to produce 
a long, even-flowing stream of it. But instead 
of being stripped off the last cylinder in a hundred 
little ribbons, it is all gathered into one even band 
a few inches wide, and wrapped round and round 
in large balls. After this, in another machine, rows 
of steel pins or combs are plunged into the band 
as it travels through what are called " gill boxes,'' 
and are dragged through it at different rates — 
which has two effects ; it combs the fibres parallel, 
and it draws the band out. After this has been 
done again and again, with finer teeth each time, 
the long fibres can be seen through a microscope 
all lying parallel to one another, and only the 
short curly fibres, that have escaped the teeth, 
lying across them. That is the stage at which 
the combing comes in. It takes out the short 
curly fibres, the "noil" — you see them tumbling 
into the bucket by themselves along with the 



The New Industry 291 

burrs that remain in the wool. And only the long 
straight parallel fibres are left. The clean, smooth, 
shiny, well-stretched band which is wound away 
when the combing is finished is wrapped around 
itself into a great white ball. The wool in that 
stage is called the " top.'' 

At that point comes a break in the manufacture. 
It is possible to draw out and spin the top into 
thread there and then. But for the most part the 
factories stop there, and sell the " top " all ready for 
other factories to spin. A "top" is a recognised 
article of commerce exactly as a ball of wool or a 
reel of cotton is. The making of " tops " is one of 
the great industries of Bradford. When the wool 
comes from Australia they call them "Botany 
tops/' though there was probably never an ounce 
of wool shipped from Botany. It is a strange 
thing that the one big factory in New South 
Wales for the making of "tops" has lately been 
built at Botany. The big German firms can make 
120,000 bales into "tops" in the year. They are 
trebling this Sydney plant to deal with 20,000. 

These " tops," which they are now sending from 
that Botany factory to Japan as fast as ever they 
can make them, are the only manufactured wool 
which Australia exports. They have to compete 
abroad with the manufactures of the world. But 
there does seem to be really room for an 



292 On the Wool Track 

Australian industry here, because if this wool is 
sent to England to be made into "tops/' all the 
" noil " that is in the long wool, not to speak of a 
considerable part of the red soil of Australia and 
the burrs that grow on it, and the grease if the 
wool is unscoured, have to be shipped with it — 
and freight paid on the lot. If the Australian 
manufacturer is careful to buy a wool with plenty 
of the real Australia dusted through it — which is 
every bit as good a wool as any other when it is 
scoured, but is a bad wool to carry to England 
unscoured, and is therefore cheaper than cleaner 
wool — he ought to have a good margin for profit. 
The Commonwealth Government, to set that 
manufacture on its legs, gives a small bonus on 
every pound exported for the next year or two. 
And to make up for it, the State Government 
leaves its one big manufacturing centre entirely 
cut off from any railway. So much for "top"- 
making. 

The wool-combers are generally content to make 
merely "tops," but the trade has not yet been so 
divided in Australia. You may see every process 
from the dyeing of the fleece to the pressing of the 
cloth, for example, in the factory of J. Vicars & 
Co. at Marrickville. 

The thread is made from combed wool by 
drawing it out and spinning it. I watched at 



22I5184 Strings 293 

the Marrickville factory while sixteen ribbons of 
wool were drawn out into a single ribbon of less 
width than any of the original ones. Of the 
ribbon that resulted eight bands were again drawn 
into one, and then six of this and four of the next, 
and so on — until in the end the remnants of no 
less than 221,184 original strings of wool had 
been combined and drawn out to a thread almost 
as slender as silk, which was being wound around 
a bobbin so fast that you could only see the film 
of it from a spindle revolving 7000 times a minute. 

That thread in which all the fibres had been 
laid carefully lengthwise had naturally hardly an 
end of fibre sticking out of it. It was a hard-faced 
shiny thread. For some reason or another they 
call it "worsted.'' The soft thread made by the 
other process they call " woollen." Of one of the 
two, or of a combination of them, all woollen 
clothes are made. 

One is not going here to describe in detail the 
process of weaving, or the wonderful machine of 
which the first cranky grandfather was invented 
125 years ago by an English clergyman, who had 
never even seen a loom at work, and was utterly 
ignorant of machinery. It struck him from the 
little he knew of weaving that there were only 
three motions in the whole process, and that as 
they followed regularly on one another they could 



294 O^ th^ Wool Track 

be produced by machinery. He got a carpenter 
and a smith to build him the machine he described 
to them. And out of that clumsy concern has 
grown the wonderful machinery of to-day. 

The various coloured threads in the pattern that 
run lengthwise down the cloth are arranged in 
their order before they are taken to loom. But 
the different colours that run across the cloth are 
mechanically arranged at the loom. The man who 
arranges the order of the warp has in his hand a 
paper with a few numbers on it. At the loom — 
running perpendicularly from top to bottom of it — 
is a chain something like a big bicycle chain, with 
different projections on different links. That 
scribbled paper and this bicycle chain are the 
pattern. 

If you watch the warp as it is regularly raised 
and lowered whilst the shuttle with the grey weft 
flashes through it, you will find that exactly when 
you are expecting it, exactly when it ought to 
appear, a different shuttle carrying a red weft has 
shot past. And before you realise it the red streak 
in the cloth has been woven into it and left behind. 
The man who can watch that machine at work 
without the cold creeping down his spine will be 
proof against most sensations. 

Sometimes the warp consists of worsted threads 
and the weft of woollen threads. Sometimes they 



The Pattern 295 



are both woollen or both worsted. The worsted 
threads are always clearly seen. You can pick out 
every thread in their pattern. The woollen threads 
hide themselves behind their soft downy surface, 
and often conceal the pattern. A worsted cloth is 
neat and bright. The thread that makes dress 
cloths and serges is worsted. The cloth is porous, 
and apt to wear shiny. For softness and elasticity 
and warmth and comfort it is not comparable to 
the woollen cloth. 

In a woollen cloth they take advantage of the 
scaly nature of the wool even after the cloth is 
woven. They soak the cloth in a solution of soap, 
and then squash it out between rollers, and finally 
squeeze it in through a narrow box. This forces 
the scales of each wool fibre to interlock with the 
scales of fibres on every side of it. It is called 
milling or felting, and it is sometimes continued for 
twelve hours, and cloth that went in eighty-six 
inches wide will shrink to fifty-six inches, and 
shrink correspondingly in length also. When it 
comes out there is not a trace of the individual 
threads left. The cloth is one solid smooth felt. 
Afterwards something like a lawn-mower moves 
over the face of it — shears oft' the long fibres, and 
leaves a soft down. That milled cloth is the sort 
of cloth they make a soldier's red tunic out of. 

They have machinery nowadays by which a boy 



296 On the Wool Track 

can make almost any mortal thing as well as the 
oldest handicraftsmen. The world has passed the 
old English weaving centres long since, has left 
them far behind in the race to get rich in a hurry. 
But there are still one or two refinements of manu- 
facture that no machine of itself has yet compassed. 
There is a certain valley deep in the Gloucestershire 
hills where from father to son they have given 
their whole honest lifetimes of work to the weaving 
of certain cloth. It does not much matter what 
they pay for their wool, because the work they 
put into it is so great that the original cost of the 
wool is of small consequence beside it. They make 
there — amongst other things — a cloth that is truer 
and softer and more even than any other cloth in 
the world. They need for it a wool of an even 
staple, of exquisite quality and not over-long, so 
that the even ends of the fibres may stand up and 
make a perfect surface for ivory balls to run over. 

That cloth is billiard cloth. And the wool — 
they call the wool first clothing out in the real 
Australia. 

The End 



PRINTED BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., BDINBURGH. 



EDEN PHILLPOTTS 



The Thief of Virtue ckth, i2mo. $1.50 

** If living characters, perfect plot construction, imaginative breadth 
of canvas and absolute truth to life are the primary qualities of great 
realistic fiction, Mr. Phillpotts is one of the greatest novelists of the 
day. . . . He goes on turning out one brilliant novel after 
another, steadily accomplishing for Devon what Mr. Hardy did for 
Wessex. This is another of Mr. Phillpotts' Dartmoor novels, and 
one that will rank with his best. . . Something of kinship with 
*King Lear' and * Pere Goriot.' " Chicago Record Herald, 

**The Balzac of Dartmore. It is easy and true to say that Mr. 
Phillpotts in all his work has done no single piece of portraiture 
better than this presentation of Philip Ouldsbroom. . . A triumph 
of the novelist's understanding and keen drawing. . . A Dart- 
moor background described in terms of an artist's deeply felt 
appreciation. — Ne^w York World. 

*'No other English writer has painted such facinating and colorful 
word -pictures of Dartmoor's heaths and hills, woods and vales, and 
billowy plains of pallid yellow and dim green. Few others have 
attempted such vivid character-portrayal as marks this latest work 
from beginning to end." The North American. 

** A strong book, flashing here and there with beautiful gems of 
poetry. . . Providing endless food for thought. . . An in- 
tellectual treat." — London E<vening Standard. 

The Haven cioth. i2mo. $1.50 

"The foremost English novelist with the one exception of Thomas 
Hardy. . . His descriptions of the sea and his characterization 
of the fisher folks are picturesqne, true to life, full of humorous 
philosophy." — JeannetieL. Gilder in The Chicago Tribune. 

**It is no dry bones of a chronicle, but touched by genius to life 
and vividness. " — Louis<villey Kentucky y Post. 

*' A close, thoughtful study of universal human nature." 

—The Outlook. 

'* One of the best of this author's many works." — The Bookman. 



THE COMPLETE WORKS 

OF 

WILLIAM J. LOCKE 

"Life is a glorious thing.** — W, /. Locke 

"If you wish to be lifted out of the petty cares of to-day, read one 
of Locke's novels. You may select any from the following titles 
and be certain of meeting some new and delightful friends. His 
characters are worth knowing. * ' — Baltimore Sun, 

The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne The Demagogue and Lady Phayre 

At the Gate of Samaria The Beloved Vagabond 

A Study in Shadows The W^hite Dove 

Simon the Jester The Usurper 

Where Love Is Septimus 

Derelicts Idols 

12mo, Cloth. $1,50 each 

Twelve volumes bound in green cloth. Uniform edition in box. 
SI 8, 00 per set. Half Morocco $50,00 net. Express prepaid, 

Simon the Jester 

(Profusely illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg) 
** It has all the charm and surprise of his famous * Simple Septimus.' 
It is a novel full of wit and action and life. The characters are all 
out-of-the-ordinary and splendidly depicted; and the end is an 
artistic triumph — a fitting climax for a story that's full of charm 
and surprise. '* — American Magazine, 

The Beloved Vagabond 

* ' * The Beloved Vagabond ' Is a gently-written, fascinating tale. 
Make his acquaintance some dreary, rain-soaked evening and find 
the vagabond nerve-thrilling in your own heart. ' ' 

— Chicago Record-Herald, 

Septimus (Illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg) 

''Septimus is the joy of the year. " — American Magazine, 

The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne 

' ' One of those rare and much-to-be-desired stories which keep one 
divided between an interested impatience to get on and an irresis- 
tible temptation to linger for full enjoyment by the way. *' — Life, 

Where Love Is 

'* One of those unusual novels of which the end is as good as the 
beginning. ' * — Ne^jo York Globe, 



WILLIAM J. LOCKE 
The Usurper 

•* Contains the hall-mark of genius itself. The plot is masterly in 
conception, the descriptions are all vivid flashes from a brilliant 
pen. It is impossible to read and not marvel at the skilled work- 
manship and the constant dramatic intensity of the incident, situ- 
ations and climax." — The Boston Herald. 

Derelicts 

•* Mr. Locke tells his story in a very true, a very moving, and a 
very noble book. If any one can read the last chapter with dry 
eyes we shall be surprised. * Derelicts ' is an impressive, an im- 
portant book. Yvonne is a creation that any artist might be proud 
of." — The Daily Chronicle^ 

Idols 

•• One of the very few distinguished novels of this present book 

season." — The Daily Mail. 

" A brilliantly written and eminently readable book." 

— The London Daily Telegraph. 

A Study in Shadows 

•* Mr. Locke has achieved a distinct success in this novel. He has 
struck many emotional chords, and struck them all with a firm, 
sure hand. In the relations between Katherine and Raine he had 
a delicate problem to handle, and he has handled it delicately." 

--The Daily Chronicle, 

The White Dove 

" It is an interesting story. The characters are strongly conceived 
and vividly presented, and the dramatic moments are powerfully 
realized." — The Morning Post. 



\ 



The Demagogue and Lady Phayre 

** Think of Locke's clever books. Then think of a book as differ* 
ent from any of these as one can well imagine — that will be Mr. 
Locke's new book." — New York World. 

At the Gate of Samaria 

** William J. Locke's novels are nothing if not unusual. They are 
marked by a quaint originality. The habitual novel reader inevi« 
tably is grateful for a refreshing sense of escaping the commoo> 
place path of conclusion." — Chicago Record- Herald, 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 

Heretics. Essays. i2mo, $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents. 
"Always entertaining." — New York Evening Sun, 
"Always original." — Chicag0 Tribune, 

Orthodoxy. Uniform with "Heretics." 

\2mo, $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents. 

"Here is a man with something to say." — Brooklyn Life, 

"A work of genius." — Chicago Evening Post. 

" ^Orthodoxy ' is the most important religious work that has ap- 
peared since Emerson." — North American Review, 

"Is likely to produce a sensation. An extraordinary book which 
will be much read and talked about." — New York Globe. 

All Things Considered. Essays on various subjects, 
such as: 

Conceit and Caricature; Spiritualism; Science and 
Religion ; Woman, etc. 

\2fno, $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents, 

"Full of the author's abundant vitality, wit and unflinching 
optimism." — Book News. 

The Napoleon of Notting Hill. \2fn0, $1.50. 

"A brilliant piece of satire, gemmed with ingenius paradox." 

— Boston Herald, 

Creorge Bernard Shaw. An illustrated Biography. 
\2mo, $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents. 

The Ball and the Cross. \2mo. $1.50. 

Gilbert K. Chesterton. A Criticism. 

Cloth, \2mo, $1.^0 net. Postage 12 cents. 

An illustrated biography of this brilliant author ; also an 
able review of his works. 

**The anonymous author is a critic with uncommon discrimination 
and good sense. Mr. Chesterton possesses one of the best attri- 
butes of genius — impersonality." — Baltimore News, 



ANATOLE FRANCE 



••Anatole France is a writer whose personality is very strongly re- 
flected in his works. ... To reproduce his evanescent grace 
and charm is not to be lightly achieved, but the translators have 
done their work with care, distinction, and a very happy sense of 
the value of words." — Daily Graphic* 

"We must now all read all of Anatole France. The offer is too 
good to be shirked. He is just Anatole France, the greatest 
living writer of French." — Daily Chronicle^ 

Complete Limited Edition in English 

Under the general editorship of Frederic Chapman. 
&VO., special light-weight paper, wide margins, Caslon 
type, bound in red and gold, gilt top, and papers from 
designs by Beardsley, initials by Ospovat. $2.00 per 
volume (except John of hxc)^ postpaid. 



Balthasar 

The Well of St. Clare 
The Red Lily 
Mother of Pearl 

The Crime of 

Sylvestre Bonnard 
The Garden of Epicurus 
Thais 
The Merrie Tales of 

Jacques Tournebroche 
Joan of Arc. Two volumes. 

$8 net per set. Postage extra. 

The Comedian's Tragedy 
The Amethyst Ring 
M. Bergeret in Paris 
Life and Letters (4 vols.) 



Pierre Noziere 
The White Stone 
Penguin Island 

The Opinions of 
Jerome Coignard 

Jocasta and 
the Famished Cat 

The Aspirations of 
Jean Servien 

The Elm Tree on 
the Mall 

My Friend's Book 

The Wicker- 
Work Woman 

At the Sign of 
the Queen Pedauque 

Profitable Tales 



CAPTAIN DESMOND 

BY 
MAUD DIVER 

Author of the Trilogy of East Indian Life, — Three Novels of 
Anglo-Indian Army Life, as follows : 

CAPTAIN DESMOND 
THE GREAT AMULET 
CANDLES IN THE WIND 

Cloth, i2mo. $i.Jo each 

London Morning Post : ** Vigor of characterization accom- 
panied by an admirable terseness and simplicity of expres- 
sion. ... A brilliant and convincing study of an 
undying problem. Its bracing atmosphere of sanity and 
directness makes one better for reading it." 

Pall Mall Gazette: "A very sound piece of work, which 
introduces us to a writer of ability, insight and observation." 

The Bookman: "Mrs. Diver not only takes the reader 
inside real Anglo-Indian life as it is lived by people who 
have more to do than * play tennis with the ten command- 
ments,' but invests the complications of marriage with pro- 
found interest. This finest of all fine arts, the art of living 
together, is the theme of her story, and we could not wish a 
healthier or more original study of the problem. It is a 
genuine pleasure to come across a story of such ability and 
vitality." 

The AthencBum: " Mrs. Diver excels in representing the 
better side of Anglo-Indian life, in bringing vividly before 
us its strenuousness, self-sacrifice and loyalty. . . Such 
wide issues as Frontier warfare, cholera camps and Hima- 
layan exploration play a large part in the action, and are 
handled with sympathy and power." 



THE GREAT AMULET 

By MAUD DIVER 

Cloth. i2mo, $i.Jo 

The Times: "Mrs. Diver has had opportunities for studying the 
strong, silent man of action at close quarters, and has all an artist's 
admiration for the type. Her hero is alive, individual, interesting. 
The scene is once more the Punjab and the Frontier, and some of the 
characters in Mrs. Diverts previous novel, "Capt. Desmond, V.C.,*' ap- 
pear again. ... A powerful, interesting book, which strikes the 
reader as sincere and actual." 

The Outlook: "A very fine and vital piece of work. Mrs. Diver 
knows her Indian life to the heart, and has a rare gift of conveying a 
sense of it to the reader, alike in its everyday duties and its moments 
of exalted heroism. Specially noteworthy is her dealing with the loyal, 
inarticulate comradeship of men; her book is a book of friendship. 
After so many cynical studies of Anglo-Indian life, it is no small plea- 
sure to come on so gallant and true-hearted a story, one which depicts 
the nobler side of men and women doing England's work on the bor- 
ders of her Empire.** 

Pall Mall Gazette: "An Anglo-Indian study which not only gives 
no place to society scandal, but also presents, unostentatiously, the 
most inspiring aspect of Empire-building. In her many-sided descrip- 
tions of the natural beauties of India, and in her presentation of Indian 
frontier life Mrs. Diver has few equals among contemporary writers. 
But the central merit of The Great Amulet lies in skilful characteriza- 
tion. Quita Maurice, a remarkable and complex personality, is abso- 
lutely true to life ; the virtues and failings of her rare kind present a 
portrait unerring in every respect. Lenox, also an unusual individual, 
approximates closely to one man^s £9icture of another. Hardly one 
touch suggests the woman's hand.*' 

The Argonaut {^^xi Francisco): "The Great Amulet is a notable 
novel. One of the very few that leave a deep impression on the 
mind. . . The author never writes anything that is dull or super- 
fluous. She is always enthusiastic, and can always hold the attention 
from beginning to end.*' 



An American Love-Story 

MARGARITA'S SOUL 

BY 

JOSEPHINE DASKAM BACON 

[INGRAHAM LOVELL] 

Profusely Illustrated. Sixteen full-page half-tone illustrations. 

Numerous line cuts, reproduced from drawings by J. Scott 

Williams. Also Whistler Butterfly Decorations. 

Cloth. 12mo, $1,50 

** Filled with imaginative touches, resourceful, intelligent 
and amusing. An ingenious plot that keeps the interest sus- 
pended until the end, and has a quick and shrewd sense of 
humor.** — Boston Transcript, 

** A reviewer would hesitate to say how long it is since a 
writer gave us so beautiful, so naive, so strangely brought up 
and introduced, a heroine. It is to be hoped that the author 
is already at work on another novel." —Toronto Globe, 

"May cause the reader to miss an important engagement 
or neglect his business. A love story of sweetness and purity 
touched with the mythical light of Romance and aglow with 
poetry and tenderness. One of the most enchanting creatures 
in modern fiction.'* — San Francisco Bulletin, 

**It is extremely entertaining from start to finish, and 
there are most delightful chapters of description and romantic 
scenes which hold one positively charmed by their beauty and 
unusualness. * ' — Boston Herald, 

"Sentimental, with the wholesome, pleasing sentimentality 
of the old bachelor who has not turned crusty. . . A Thack- 
erayan touch." — Ne^ York Tribune, 

"Captures the imagination at the outset by the boldness 
of the situation. . . We should be hard put to it to name a 
better American novel of the month." —The Outlook, 



M. P. WILLCOCKS 

The Way Up cioth, i2mo. $i,50 

This novel Is one that touches three burning questions of the hour — 
capital and labor, the claims of the individual against those of the 
State, the right of a woman to her own individuality. Besides 
being a picture of a group of modem men and women, it is also a 
study of certain social tendencies of to-day and possibly to-morrow. 

The Wingless Victory cioth, i2mo, $1.50 

" A moving drama of passion, of frailty, of long temptation and of 
ultimate triumph over it." — Pall Mall Gazette. 

*'A most remarkable novel which places the author in the first 
rank. This is a novel built to last." — Outlook. 

"A book worth keeping on the shelves, even by the classics, for It 
is painted in colors which do not fade. ' ' — Times. 

** Fresh and fervent, instinct with genuine passion and emotion and 
all the fierce primitive joys of existence. It is an excellent thing 
for any reader to come across this book." — Standard. 

"A splendid book. " —Tribune. 

A Man of Genius Omamemal Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 

**Far above the general level of contemporary fiction. . . A 
work of unusual power. " — Professor William Lyon Phelps. 

Widdicombe: A Romance of the Devonshire Moors 

IZmo. $1.50 



MRS. JOHN LANE 

According to Maria cioth. i2mo. $1.50 

**Mrs. Lane's touch is light, yet not flippant. She is shrewd and 
humorous, and a miracle of tactful good temper; but she hits hard 
and straight at many really vital social weaknesses. Future social 
historians will find here ample material. Present-day social de- 
linquents and social critics alike may read with pleasure and profit." 

— London Morning Leader. 

The Champagne Standard 

Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents. 
** Mrs. John Lane having been brought up in this country, and hav- 
ing married in England, is in a position to view British society as an 
American, and American society as a Londoner. The result is this 
very entertaining book." — Nenx) York Evening Sun. 



DOLF WYLLARDE 

J2m9 $1*50 each 

•* Dolf Wyllarde sees life with clear eyes and puts down what she 
sees with a fearless pen. . . . More than a little of the flavor 
of Kipling, in the good old days of Plain Tales from the Hills." 

— New York Globe. 

Mafoota 

A Romance of Jamaica 

" The plot has a resemblance to that of Wilkie Collins' * The New 
Magdalen,' but the heroine is a puritan of the strictest type ; the 
subject matter is like *The Helpmate.'" — Springfield Republican, 

As Ye Have Sown 

" A brilliant story dealing with the world of fashion." 

Captain Amyas 

" Masterly." — San Francisco Examiner, 

" Startlingly plain spoken." — Louisville Courier- Journal. 

The Rat Trap 

** The literary sensation of the year." — Philadelphia Item. 

The Story of Eden 

" Bold and outspoken, a startling book." — Chicago Record-Herald, 

" A real feeling of brilliant sunshine and exhilarating air." 

•^^Spectator, 

Rose-White Youth. 

*:^* The love-story of a young girl. 

The Pathway of the Pioneer. 

*:ic* The story of seven girls wno have banded themselves together 
for mutual help and cheer under the name of ** Nous Autres." 
They represent, collectively, the professions open to women of no 
deliberate training, though well educated. They are introduced to 
the reader at one of their weekly gatherings and then the author 
proceeds to depict the home and business life of each one individ- 
ually. 

EMERY POTTLE 

Handicapped. An American Love-story. 

Ornamental cloth, i2mo. $1.^0. 

*^ij*A stirring romance dealing with fashionable life in New York 
and the hunting set in the country. A strong love-story based 
upon an unusual theme. 



VERNON LEE 

Cloth. 12mo, $1.50 net each. Postage 15 cents, 

**If we were asked to name the three authors writing in English 
to-day to whom the highest rank of cleverness and brilliancy might be 
accorded, we would not hesitate to place among them Vernon Lee." 
VanitaS -Baltimore Sun. 

A-lthCAI Dialogues on Aspirations and Duties 
LaurUS Nobilis: Essays on Art and Life 

Renaissance Fancies and Studies 

The Countess of Albany 

Limbo and Other Essays, including: 

"Ariadne in Mantua'* 
Pope Jacynth, and Other Fantastic Tales 
Hortus Vitae, or the Hanging Gardens 
The Sentimental Traveller 
The Enchanted Woods 
The Spirit of Rome 
Genius Loci 
Hauntings 

SEEKERS IN SICILY 

Being a Quest for Persephone 
BY ELIZABETH BISLAND AND ANNE HOYT 

Cloth, 12mo, $1.50 net, Postage 20 cents. Illustrated. 

A delightful account of Sicily, its people, country and villages. More 
than a guide book, this volume is a comprehensive account of what all 
who are interested in this beautiful island wish to know. 



THE SECRET LIFE 

Being the Book of a Heretic 
BY ELIZABETH BISLAND 

Cloth, 12mo, $1.50 net. Postage 8 cents. 

"A book of untrammeled thought on living topics freely expressed 
without restraint in a journal intended, as it were, for no other eye than 
that of the confiding author." — Philadelphia Press. 



CHARLES MARRIOTT 



The Intruding Angel cloth, i2mo, $1.50. 

The story of a mistaken marriage, and the final solution of the 
problem for the happiness of all parties concerned. 

When a Woman Woos cloth. i2mo. $1,50, 

*' Unique. The book is on the whole a study of the relations of 
men and women in the particular institution of marriage. It is 
an attempt to define what a real marriage is, and it shows very 
decidedly what it is not. Full of the material of life. ' ' 

— Ne^w York Times Book Re'vie^w. 

A Spanish Holiday 

Illustrated. Cloth. S'vo, $2.50 net. Postage 20 cents. 

**The spirit of Spain has been caught to a very great degree by the 
author of this book, and held fast between its covers. *' 

— Book Ne'ws.. 



NETTA SYRETT 
Olivia L. Carew cloth. i2mo. $1.50 

An interesting character study of a passionless, self-absorbed woman 
humanized by the influence of a man's love and loyal devotion. 

Anne Page, a Love-story of To-day Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 

"Readers must judge for themselves. Women may read it for 
warning as well as entertainment, and they will find both. Men 
may read it for reproach that any of their kind can treat such women 
so. And moralists of either sex will find instructions for their 
homilies, as well as a warning that there may be more than one 
straight and narrow way." — Ne^iv York Times. 

Six Fairy Plays for Children 

Sq. 12mo. $1.00 net. Postage 8 cents. 



THE NEW POCKET LIBRARY 

Uniform Editions, Boxed 

Printed from a clear type upon a specially thin and opaque paper 
manufactured for the series 

Anthony TroUope. i6 volumes in dark olive green cloth 
or leather, boxed. 

Dr. Thorne Barchester Towers The Warden 

Framley Parsonage The Bertrams The Three Clerks 

Castle Richmond Orley Farm (2 vols.) Rachel Ray 

The Macdermots of Ballycloran Can you Forgive Her? (a vols.) 

The Small House at AUington (2 vols.) 

The Kellys and the O'Kellys 

Flexible leather, $12,00 net Cloth, $8.00 net Express ^o cents 



George Borrow, s volumes in dark olive green. 

Lavengro The Romany Rye The Bible in Spain 

The Zincali Wild Wales 

Flexible leather, $j.jo net Cloth, $2.jo net Express 2^ cents 

Beaconsfield. A reissue of the Novels of the Earl of 
Beaconsfield. Each with an Introduction by the Earl 
of Iddesleigh. 

Sybil Tancrcd Venctia Contarini Fleming 

Coningsby Henrietta Temple Vivian Grey 

i The Young Duke ( Alroy 

\ The Rise of Iskander J Popanilla 

( The Infernal Marriage ] Count Alarcos 

[ixion in Heaven 

9 volumes inflexible leather, $6.jo net 9 volumes in cloth, $4.jo net 
Express JO cents 

George Eliot 

Adam Bede The Mill on the Floss Silas Mamer 

Scenes of Clerical Life 

4 volumes inflexible leather, $j.oo net 4 volumes in cloth^ $2.00 mt 
Express 2j cents 



POEMS WORTH HAVING 
Stephen Phillips 

New Poems, including Iole : A Tragedy in One Act ; Launcelot 
AND Guinevere, Endymion, and many other hitherto unpub- 
lished poems. 
Cloth^ i2mo $1.2^ net Half m orocco, $4.00 net Postage 10 cents 
** I have read the * New Poems ' of Stephen Phillips with the great- 
est interest. In my judgment it is the best volume that he has 
ever published." — Wm. Lyon Phelps of Yale University. 
Uniform Sets. 4 volumes, including New Poems, Poems, Paolo 
and Francesca, Herod. 
Cloih^ $j,oo net Half morocco^ %iS*oo net Express ^o cents 

Laurence Hope 

Complete Works. Uniform Edition 3 volumes. i2mo. Bound 
in red cloth, in box. 

India's Love Lyrics, including " The Garden of Kama." 
Stars of the Desert 

Last Poems. Translations from the Book of Indian Love. 
Clothy $4.JO net Postage ^^ cents Half morocco^ $12.00 
Postage JO cents 
** The comparison of Laurence Hope to Sappho readily suggested 
itself to the admiring reviewers of her first book of poems. . . . 
The compliment w^as fully deserved. ... As a singer of the 
melancholy of love and passion, Laurence Hope surpasses Swin- 
burne in intensity of feeling and beauty of thought." 

— New York Evening Mail. 

The Poems of Arthur Symons 

A Collected Edition of the Poet's works issued in two volumes 
with a Photogravure Portrait as Frontispiece. 

8vo $j.oo net Half morocco^ $10.00 Postage 24 cents 

The Fool of the World, and Other Poems 

By Arthur Symons 
izmo $i.jo net Half morocco^ $S'00 Postage ij cents 
** Stands at the head of all British poets of his generation." — New 
York Evening Post, 

The Poems of William Watson 

Edited and arranged with an introduction by J. A. Spender. 
In 2 volumes i2mo cloth^ $2.jonet Half morocco^ $7 SO net 

Photogravure Portrait Postage 20 cents 
•*Thc lover of poetry cannot fail to rejoice in this handsome 
edition," — Philadelphia Press. 

"Work which will live, one may venture to say, as long as the 
language." — Philadelphia Public Ledger. 



POEMS WORTH HAVING 

The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

A complete illustrated edition of the poems of the author of 
♦* Christabel," *' The Ancient Mariner,'* etc. Several hitherto un- 
published poems are included in this edition. 
Svo $j.jo net Postage 2^ cents 

The Poems of Ernest Dowson 

Illustrations and a Cover-design by Aubrey Beardsley. 
An Introductory Memoir by Arthur Symons, and a 
Portrait. 

" Belongs to the class that Rossetti does, with a touch of Herrick, 
and something which is Dowson ; and Dowson alone." — Dr. Tal- 
cott Williams in Book News. 

J2mo $1.^0 net Half morocco^ $ 4,00 Postage 10 cents 

Sappho 

Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation by 
Henry Thornton Wharton. Illustrated in Photogravure. 

New Edition, 

$2.00 net Postage jo cents 

A Shropshire Lad. By A. E. Housman. New Edition 

ik:no Cloth, $1.00 net Half morocco, $j. 00 net Postage j cents 
** Mr. Housman *s verse has a very rare charm, due to its blending 
of a subdued and poignant sadness with the old pagan glorification 
of the beauty and the sacredness of youth." — The Sun, New York. 
"The best in *A Shropshire Lad* is altogether memorable; you 
cannot shake it off or quote it awry.'* — Chap Book. 
" Something to please on every page. — Brooklyn Eagle, 

The Wind Among the Reeds. By W. B. Yeats. 

i2mo $i»2j net Half morroco, $j.oo net Postage 10 cents 
"The genuine spirit of Irish antiquity and Irish folklore — the very 
spirit of the myth-makers is in him.'* — Mr. William Archer. 

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 

Rendered into English verse by Edv^ard Fitzgerald. With 9 
illustrations. (Flowers of Parnassus Series.) 

Leather, 75 cents net Cloth, ^o cents net Postage 4 cents 
A Paraphrase from Several Literal Translations. By Richard 
Le Gallienne. New Edition with fifty additional quatrains. 
With Cover-design by Will Bradley. 

i2mo $i.J0 net Postage 6 cents 



KATRINA TRASK 

Author of "Mors et Victoria/' "Night and Morning," etc. 

King^ Alfred's Jewel. With colored frontispiece repro- 
ducing the Jewel now at Oxford. flHj 

Third Edition. i2mo, $1,2^ net, Postage 10 cents 

**A vivid representation of Alfred as a man, strong in passion, 
high in reason, great in soul. The author^s imagination has m^de 
itself felt with vigor and charm. Something that needed to be 
done, and by doing it in this fashion the author has earned both 
admiration and gratitude."— Dr. Henry Van Dyke, The Outlook. 

"The English-speaking world has waited a thousand years for a 
worthy dramatic impersonation of King Alfred. And here it is. 
. . . The play will stand not alone upon the grateful response it 
wins from the English national heart, but as a work of art. . . . 
The author is supremely a poet, the master of metaphor not less 
than of melody. ... It is a play not only to be read but to be acted- 
. . . This vivid drama is not cast in the conventional classic mold. 
It is distinctly and wholly English in spirit and form, and intensely 
modern — but breathing the air of morning, of springtime, of fresh 
adventure."— Henry Mills Alden, The New York Times 
Saturday Review. 

T. A. DALY 

Author of " Canzoni," etc. 

Carmina. (Dago Dreams and Irish Blarney) New Poems. 

izmo. ^i.oo net. Postage 10 cents, 

" His Italian studies are really marvelous." — Julian Hawthorne. 

"Verses of exceeding beauty. The joyousness and lyrical quality 
of Suckling and his associate poets. In the dialect songs the emo- 
tional Italian heart — the tender sentiment of the Irish — ^is ex- 
quisitely reflected in lines that are as perfect in form as in feeling." 

— Baltimore Sun. 

" What Riley is to the homely farmers of the Middle West Daly is 
to the Italian immigrant." — Philadelphia Inquirer. 



H 76 83 




\* .. -^ '•"' f^ 







^ ^^ *if}\28j%h. o ^^ -^ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
^ S • $^Sj^^ • ^'> Treatment Date: June 2003 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 



?** ** %^ ^^|I|P!** <!''^'^ PreservationTechnologies j 



4> o«--. <^. 






.0 A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

A . I * 111 Thomson Park Drive 

^ ^0 ♦* ^,-JL* Cranberry Township, PA 16066 






"•• v 









.4 0^ 















* .-,«©»-. **,^^,4.* ,.^.. *^^^^* • /; 









JAN 83 

N. MANCHESTER, 
INDIANA 46962 








